For the Birds Read online

  Ammit smelled his deceit. The growl in her throat hummed behind her words. “Wise? Did you not think I would come for it?”

  “I had hoped you would,” he lied. “We could use your kind on our side. You too have been denied your rightful place among the gods.”

  “I do not doubt my strength like you do. That is why I have no need to prove it by destroying the peace of our evolved society.”

  Caim grew weary of playing nice. “Or perhaps you don’t prove your strength because you have none without your headdress.” He was taunting her now.

  I could hear the demons stirring, growing hungry for blood and chaos. My hand slipped from the wall as it found an opening in the rock. I almost lost my footing and went down, but a strong hand reached out and caught me under the arm.

  Maalik had followed me down the passage. Hellfire swirled softly in his eyes, lighting his face just enough for me to make out the hard lines of his features in the dark. “Hurry. We’re almost out of time.”

  I nodded and ducked through the opening and into the new passage. It spit us out before the row of openings along the lower edge of the cave. I hesitated at the end of the wall, sensing the demons just beyond.

  The demon defense training I had gone through with Bub was really going to be put to the test today. I opened my mind out in all directions. The crowd on the other side of the wall was one big pulsing red light. The heat washed off of the demons in waves and curled up along the cave walls, fading as it tapered off into the depths of the ceiling. I shuddered at the magnitude of their union. To my right, I felt for signatures through the wall that separated off the locked rooms. They were mostly empty, except for a deep red pulse that flashed from a room near the end of the hall.

  Then I felt her. The pulse was so faint that I had missed it with my first pass. It came across my mind as a soft green light, blinking off and on like a distant radio tower from the third room down. For a second, the demon chatter faded to the background, and my focus honed in, pinpointing Jenni’s location. The only sound I could hear was labored breathing. I couldn’t tell if it was mine or hers. My fingertips itched and my palms grew clammy. She was near death. It made every harvesting instinct in me creep to the surface. I pulled myself out of the daze and back into the present.

  Maalik was watching me carefully. “What was that?” he mouthed.

  I shook my head, not entirely dismissing him, just letting him know that this wasn’t the time or place to be getting into specifics. He wouldn’t have liked the explanation anyway.

  The little trick was something I had learned from Bub, right before he had kissed me for the first time. I had still been seeing Maalik, and even though I’d turned Bub down, guilt found its way into my stomach all over again, fluttering its way up to scrape along the edges of my heart, bringing the memory back in a bittersweet rush that still felt tainted by betrayal. I shook my head and threw my attention back into the moment.

  Just beyond the wall where we waited, Ammit was growing tired of Caim. “This is your final warning, traitor. Release the headdress,” she said in a voice that cracked and strained against her animal natures.

  Caim chuckled at her. “There are better than three thousand demons gathered among us. Do you really expect to leave here alive tonight?”

  Apparently, five minutes had passed. A howl went up from the crowd, followed by another. The hellhounds bellowed in harmony amidst the demons, shocking them into momentary silence.

  Ammit returned Caim’s laughter with her own gravelly chortling. “The real question is, do you expect to leave here alive tonight?”

  The hiss of Kevin and Josie’s arrows were unmistakable. I could tell they hit true by the screeching that followed. I took the cue and bolted for the room that I knew Jenni was being kept in. There was a gate located a few feet past the opening, and it was locked. The small bit of hope I’d managed to scrape together was fleeting. My first instinct was to use my axe to hack through the lock, but that would have made enough commotion to draw someone’s attention, even with the battle breaking out in the pit.

  Maalik stepped up beside me. His eyes swelled with flames. He pointed a finger at the lock, and it simply melted away with the touch of his hellfire. His eyes were still smoldering when he turned them to me. “Get what you came here for. I will find the helm,” he said, with a look just as cold as it was hot.

  I didn’t waste any time as I pushed past him and into the room. The only light I had to go by was the red glow stretching in from the doorway. It took my eyes a minute to adjust to the darkness, and when they finally did, I wished they hadn’t.

  Jenni hung from the back wall of the room. She was sickly thin and naked. Her arms twisted up behind her at odd angels, suspended by shackles that cut into her flesh. Blood ran down from her wrists in trails so old and so thick that they had begun to crust and flake away. Her skin had an orange tint to it, and it took me a minute to wrap my head around the fact that it was because she was covered in a wash of her own blood.

  She looked at me with abandoned eyes, like she had seen me before, but I wasn’t really there. Maybe she had been hallucinating. Maybe Loki had been up to his tricks here too. Maybe she was just broken.

  I pushed all the maybes away for a later time and took my axe over to the chains connected to the shackle on her right hand. Adrenaline hummed through my system, but I had enough focus to aim true. When the metal sparked and gave way, Jenni slid diagonally against the wall, hanging from her other bound hand. She groaned and blinked a few times, but still didn’t look entirely aware of her surroundings or me, even after I had chopped through the other chain that held her to the wall.

  I set my axe down and squeezed her shoulders, shaking her gently. “Jenni? Jenni, we have to go now. Everyone is waiting for us.” I looked around the room for something to cover her with, but there was nothing. The room was perfectly empty, save for the broken chains dangling from the back wall.

  Jenni finally looked up at me with some sort of recognition. “What are you doing here?”

  “Saving your ass. Well, trying to anyway. We need to go.”

  She laughed hoarsely. Tears streaked down her cheeks, turning pink as they gathered blood from her stained skin.

  “Jenni, I really need you to pull it together right now.”

  Her shoulders slouched forward, arms hanging limply between her knees. “We’ve done this before, you know? Lots of times. Sometimes it’s Josie who comes. Once, it was even Grim.”

  Loki had definitely been pulling his tricks.

  I shook her again. “Loki. He’s with the rebels. He’s been imitating us to try and get information out of you.”

  She still didn’t look convinced.

  I reached down in my boot and retrieved one of the hunting knives and a can of angelica mace. “Here,” I said, thrusting them into her numb hands. “You’re probably going to need these. It’s not going to be pretty getting out of here.”

  Jenni was placid for another minute, and then she launched herself at me, wrapping a naked arm around my neck and pressing the edge of the hunting knife up under my chin. “Did you really think giving me a knife was a good idea? Breaking the chains was a nice show, but I’m not falling for your game again. You’ll have to kill me before you put me back up on that wall,” she hissed into my face with breath that smelled like stale blood. Her lips peeled back, and I could see the red stain across her gums.

  “Jenni,” I rasped through gritted teeth.

  She pushed me away suddenly, and I got a facefull of angelica mace.

  “Damn it, Jenni! There are a lot of fucking demons out there. Don’t waste that.”

  “Lana?” she whispered, really seeing me for the first time. She looked down at the mace and the knife in her hands. “I’m so sorry. I—”

  “Forget it. We need to get the hell out of here, like now.” I grabbed her arm and pulled her up with me as I stood.

  She took in her surroundings more thoroughly now, taking particular note of
her nakedness with wide, dilating eyes.

  “Sorry, I didn’t think to bring clothes. We’ve got some back on the ship,” I said.

  “Yeah. Okay.” She nodded and tested out the knife in the air. “I can work with this. Who all did you bring?”

  “Josie, Kevin, Bub, Maalik, Ammit, and the hounds.”

  “That’s it?” Jenni looked sick.

  “Well, we didn’t really know what we were walking into. Hadn’t planned on the party out there.”

  Jenni swallowed. “We won’t be able to take them all.”

  “We don’t have to.”

  “Gonna duck tail and run?”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “You better believe it.”

  We both squatted into a fighting stance as someone shuffled into the room.

  Maalik appeared out of thin air, the Helm of Hades in hand. “What are you still doing in here?” he growled.

  “There were complications. Hey, you’ve got the helm. Give me your robe.”

  Maalik’s glare dropped as he took in Jenni’s naked flesh. He quickly stripped off his black robe and tossed it to her. My eyes were instantly drawn to his bare chest. His skin was firm and smooth and it dipped inward just before disappearing beneath his drawstring pants. Even in the middle of the mother of all crises and after all of his jackassery, he could still make my blood boil.

  He caught me staring and pasted his scowl back on. “Time to go,” he said, slipping the helm back on and vanishing from my roving eyes.

  Jenni pulled the robe over her head. It was enormous on her small frame. She took the hunting knife I had given her and slashed through the fabric just above her knees and elbows. She ripped a small strip from the leftovers and tied it around her waist, cinching the material in and out of the way. With her wits intact and her confidence restored, she looked more like the Jenni I knew and far less like the shriveled prisoner that had been chained the cave wall.

  “Let’s go kill some demons,” she said.

  The pit was in raw shape when we spilled out into the open. I didn’t see Caim, but Ammit had obviously reclaimed her headdress. The thing wasn’t posing as a hat anymore. It had grown and melted into her flesh, taking over her entire head. She was no longer the cheerful demon goddess, but rather a beast crawled up from the bowels of Duat, formidable and glorious in her outrage. She thrashed her way through to the center of the pit, taking demons down by the dozens in her wake. Some were crushed in her reptilian jaws, and others trampled under her hippopotamus stampede. Her lioness claws slashed across bellies, spilling intestines and bile where more erotic fluids had been spilled mere minutes before.

  Beelzebub was doing almost as well as Ammit. I only caught little flashes of him as his flies transported him from one side of the pit to the next. He formed only long enough to strike a fatal blow or two, and then he was gone again, off to surprise another rebel, usually at strategic moments when they looked like they just might have the upper hand against one of our comrades.

  I didn’t see Maalik, but I did see his hellfire spreading its way across the cave from one demon to another. Kevin and Josie were still on the upper ledge, raining arrows over the pit. Saul had stayed behind to stand guard over the passage at their backs, while Coreen blocked the passage that Maalik and I had come through. One of the Duat rebels tried to get past her, and I watched as my sweet little hellhound crunched through his middle, splintering ribs through flesh in a single bite. She pressed one of her hefty paws over his throat, cutting off his screams as she chewed out his heart.

  Jenni gazed over the battlefield with eager eyes. There were still too many demons, even for the likes of our brave and motley crew. I couldn’t see an out for us yet, but we were going to need one pretty damn quick. For all I knew, Caim had run off to fetch reinforcements.

  A stray demon spotted Jenni and me along the outskirts of the pit and made a running leap at us. Jenni stepped in front of me, running her knife up under the creature’s rib cage and into its heart. She pulled it out just as quickly, shucking the demon aside and wiping the blade clean on the edge of her robe.

  She gave me a smile that was just a little too wide. “I’m going to get in there.” She nodded to the pit. “Let me know when it’s time to go, kay?”

  I nodded to her, still a little too shaken to return the smile. I thought about joining her for a minute. My axe was aching in my hands, just ready get in on the action, but I couldn’t lose my mind to the battle. I needed to be thinking our way out of there, and I couldn’t do that with demons on my back.

  Winston crept into my mind. I felt guilty for considering him, but he was probably our only shot at making it out of there alive.

  “What are you waiting for, love?” Bub slipped away from the battle and formed beside me.

  “Maalik found the helm,” I said, breathless from the very bad plan forming in my mind.

  Bub nodded. “I figured as much.”

  “I need you to track him down. I need his help with something.”

  Bub frowned, but he didn’t waste time protesting. “I’m on it.” He vanished again, dispersing into a swarm of flies that circled through the bloody bodies waging war in the pit.

  Our people were losing steam, and Kevin and Josie were running out of arrows. Kevin had switched to his scythe. He pressed his lips to the side of Josie’s temple before leaping from the ledge. Josie shouted after him. He landed firmly in the center of the pit, pulling the blade up in a long arc around him. It leveled half a dozen demons, but more filled in behind them. Josie had been pacing herself, but now she tore off arrows one after another, pushing back the wall of rebels falling over themselves to get to Kevin as he sliced and diced.

  I forgot my plan and jumped in with my axe, hacking away at the demons from the backside. I hadn’t trained much with the axe, and while it was an impressive blade with enough weight behind it to split a skull in half with the ease of slicing an apple, it was still awkward and slower than using a scythe. The demons approached me carefully. They calculated the swings I took, looking for a gap in my technique. My breath was tight in my throat, and I squeezed the iron handle of the axe so tightly that I could feel it grating my palms pink.

  A scaly female demon was the first to break my defensive circle. She was one of the few with clothing. She also carried a short sword in one hand and dagger in the other. Her hooved feet slammed into my gut as she delivered a flying kick, but I managed to throw my axe handle up in time to block her sword before she put my eye out with it. She pressed down on top of me, darting her forked tongue out as she shrieked in my face. Her dagger slipped under my axe and I wasn’t quick enough to dodge it. It scraped along my hip, and I screamed back into her face with a bloody war cry of my own.

  The demons behind her burst into flames as Maalik appeared. He rested the helm under one arm and stepped up behind the demon on top of me, kicking her under the ass hard enough to topple her over my head. She squatted low to the ground and hissed Latin curses at him. I was still on my back, but I twisted around and smashed her in the face with the top edge of my axe, running the tips of both blades and the spiked shaft through her gnarled expression.

  Maalik held out his hand and helped me to my feet. “You’re injured,” he said softy, looking down at my side.

  “I’ll heal. We need to get out of here.”

  His eyes pulled away from my hip reluctantly and back up to meet my gaze. “How?”

  “Winston gave you a coin, didn’t he?”

  Maalik’s eyes lost their softness. He stared hard at me for a minute. “This is not the time for such discussions, Lana.”

  “It’s the only time for such discussions. Go. Give Winston our coordinates. Ten minutes. That’s all we need to get clear. Tell him to activate coin travel in the outer passage only. He can cave the place in after that.”

  Maalik’s shoulders sagged. “You know the condition he’s in. What if he can’t handle it?”

  I didn’t want to tell him, but I didn’t have a choi
ce. “He has another soul to help him now.”

  Maalik was stunned. I was certain that I’d never seen that particular look on his face before. He was so stunned that he didn’t even notice the demon coming up behind him. It was a scrawny, scabby male with needle teeth and bloody fingers. He launched himself between Maalik’s wings, dropping the angel to his knees. He hung on, flailing about as Maalik rocked his shoulders, trying to shake the heathen loose. The thing bit down, crunching along the bend of his wing in a quick, tight line. Blood sprayed from the puncture wounds, misting down over Maalik’s feathers. His teeth ground together and he reached aimlessly over his shoulder.

  “Get down!” I rolled the handle of my axe around and swung the blade sideways just as he flattened himself to the cave floor. It sliced through the top of the demon’s head. Half of its skull slid away, sloshing to the ground and leaking steaming brains while the thing’s torso twitched and crumpled in a pile behind Maalik.

  “Where’s your coin?” Maalik said through gritted teeth, struggling to focus his eyes at me. “We can both get out of here.” It didn’t occur to me until just then that he was mad at me because he still wanted me. Through all the anger and political secrets and bullshit, he honestly still thought we had a chance, and he honestly still wanted to protect me.

  I put a hand on his shoulder, steadying him as his consciousness waivered. “Loki stole my coin last night at the factory, and besides, I can’t leave the others here.”

  Maalik pulled away from my hand. The Helm of Hades was still tucked under one arm. He thrust it at me. “Fine. I’ll go, but you put this on.”

  “You should take it with you—”

  “Put it on,” he growled at me, forcefully pushing it into my chest. I winced at his outburst but went ahead and took the helmet. Maalik’s consciousness was flickering again. “I don’t care if there’s another soul. Make it home. You’re still needed.” He took Winston’s coin from his pocket and flipped it in the air, vanishing on his last word.