CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THIS ISN’T IRON.
That was my first thought when I touched the object, immediately followed by an internal screech as power shot up my arm. It rocked me back on my heels, but it didn’t drive me to my knees like the staff had. Nor did that feeling of power grow like it had when I first wielded the slingshot. Instead, it seemed to settle inside my bones with a low, uncomfortable hum that reminded me of the aftereffects of an electrical shock.
This wasn’t the spearhead. It was way too long, not to mention that if it was, I’d be comatose at best and dead at worst. Not picking the object up and cocking my head as I examined it while I wondered what it was. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was a long stick, but that made no sense. The only famous stick I was aware of was the staff that was still embedded in my skin... Wait. That’s right. Embedded.
“Adrian,” I called out, and felt the rush of air from how fast he ran to me. “This isn’t the spearhead, but I think it’s the pilum that the spearhead used to be embedded in.”
A first-century Roman javelin was no more than a long wooden stick with a nasty iron shank fastened at the end of it. A simple weapon, but deadly enough to impale someone right through their armor, let alone through vulnerable flesh.
This part of the weapon shouldn’t still exist. Zach had told me that the spearhead was all that was left of the weapon, yet here it was. Had he actually been lying to me?
Adrian looked at the wooden shaft but wisely made no move to touch it. If holding it felt like getting repeated electric shocks to me, it might really injure Adrian.
“The base of the holy lance,” he said with a surprising amount of awe in his tone. Then he let out a harsh laugh. “No wonder Zach sent us here. Most hallowed objects are reduced to mere fragments because of the passage of time. Those pieces might be powerful in and of themselves, but they’re nothing like what they could be if the objects were reassembled again.”
I stared at him in understanding. “Now we have half of the lance, so if we find the spearhead and put it back together—”
“Boom,” Adrian said succinctly.
As charged as this was, the shaft was the equivalent of an accessory. But putting it back together with the spearhead would turn it into the equivalent of a supernatural bomb, and we all knew what happened to anyone in the direct path of a bomb.
Boom, indeed.
I set my chin and refused to feel sorry for myself. I’d done too much of that already. Yes, dying young sucked. Yes, losing Adrian would suck even worse, but if nothing else, the combined power of the shaft and the spearhead rejoined meant that I had a real chance to save those people. Reassembling it should blast that lethal power out through me and into every demon realm. I’d die, but I’d die knowing that I was delivering a knockout punch to every demon in existence.
They might get back up eventually, since—as Zach reminded me—the final fight was between Archons and demons, not humans and demons. But unlike what I’d been afraid of before, my death wouldn’t be in vain. Instead, with the ultra-amped, reassembled final hallowed weapon, it should allow countless humans to escape a fate worse than death.
Hey, if I was going to die, I might as well go out with the biggest bang possible. Maybe I’d tell Zach to have my headstone read “Suck on THAT, demons!”
“Okay, one piece down, the other half to go,” I said, carefully setting the lance back down. “The spearhead’s got to be at one of the five remaining places on your list...”
My voice trailed off as I stared at the tattoo on my right hand, then looked at the sky. I wasn’t in an emotional frenzy anymore, so the sky shouldn’t be as eerily black with clouds as it still was. And my tattoos shouldn’t be activating, but the one in my hand was turning a lighter shade of brown and starting to throb, as was the other tattoo in my body.
I cast a new, horrified look at the sky. It hadn’t been the staff altering the weather because of the pain I’d felt at leaving Adrian. I hadn’t caused any of this. And if I hadn’t, then I could think of only one creature that would have the ability—let alone the desire—to darken a sunny afternoon into midnight-like darkness.
Demons.
I wasn’t the only one who’d figured it out. “Ivy.” Adrian’s voice thrummed with intensity. “Get on Brutus’s back and have him fly you back to hallowed ground. Now.”
“What about you?” I protested.
He shoved me toward Brutus. “I’ll hold them off until you’re safe.”
“I’m not leaving without you,” I began, but stopped as something in the sky caught my eye.
At first, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Then ice felt like it blasted through my veins as memory pieced together the impossible image and gave it context.
“Too late,” I whispered. “None of us can fly out of here.”
Adrian spun around. I knew the instant he spotted the thing, and he figured out far quicker than I had what it was.
“Blinky,” he hissed.
Such an innocuous-sounding nickname. Mocking, in fact, considering that Adrian had called his former demon captive that due to the dozens of sets of eyes covering him. Blinky had them because he had once been a seraph, one of the highest levels of Archons. In addition to his freaky sets of eyes that covered his entire upper body, he also had three separate sets of wings. Blinky was now using all of those wings to fly toward us with the speed of a proverbial bat out of hell.
“No one holds a grudge like a demon,” Adrian muttered.
“Especially one you tortured and imprisoned for years,” I added, yanking at my tattoo. I kept yanking until the sling was all the way out of my arm, then I notched it with one of the rocks I’d stuffed into my pockets. As soon as it was armed, I began to spin the sling.
“Back away from me, Adrian. One clean hit—”
“He’s not alone,” Adrian interrupted.
I squinted, but I couldn’t see anything except the darkness around Blinky. It radiated from him as if he were a black hole that sucked in all the light around him. Still, I took Adrian at his word and got more rocks at the ready.
He stripped off his shirt and used it to pick up the wooden lance. Even with the layers of material between him and the hallowed object, he still winced as if it hurt him to touch it. Then he stuffed it between the leather belts of Brutus’s harness while saying something in Demonish to the gargoyle.
“No matter what, we can’t let them get this,” he told me, switching to English. “If it’s a choice between me or it, you save it, Ivy. Otherwise, we’re all dead anyway.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed, but we had to live through this in order to fight about it later. Blinky was only about a hundred yards away now. Close enough for me to see his brown hair, his pale skin and, worst of all, his eyes. One look into them, and revulsion hit me like a splash.
I didn’t know how his eyes seemed to pour evil onto everything they looked upon, but they did. Then he smiled, and gooseflesh rippled across my skin with the speed of the lightning flash that finally showed me what Adrian had already seen: half a dozen demons flying behind Blinky. Three were covered in eyes and had those extra sets of wings, letting me know that they were seraphs, too. Wherever they flew, the darkness around them thickened until it felt like it had tangible form.
“Go for Blinky and the other seraphs first. They’re the most dangerous,” Adrian said, pulling out two long knives from a weapons satchel that Brutus also had attached to his harness. He couldn’t kill the demons with those, but he could slow them down, and then I could finish them.
But I couldn’t risk a strike with the sling until they were close, and letting seven demons get that close was almost suicidal. Still, we had no choice. I spun the sling faster.
Two of the seraphs broke formation and disappeared into the clouds that kept all sunlight at bay and thus allowed them to come out before nightfall. Adrian said something in Demonish to Brutus, who turned his back to us and thrust his wings out in chop formation. Now our backs were guarded.
Adrian took point to the left several feet away, giving me ample room for my sling. I kept spinning it faster, my gaze darting around as I waited for one of the demons to get close enough to attack. Strangely, I wasn’t afraid. Maybe it was because I hadn’t come this far only to get killed by demons. If anything was going to kill me, it was going to be that damn spearhead!
With a speed I didn’t believe possible, two of the seraphs suddenly torpedoed into Adrian with such force that it left a hole where he’d been standing. The hole was so deep that I couldn’t see him anymore, but I saw the madly flapping wings and hideous numerous eyes of the seraphs. I was in the process of hurling a stone at them when agony exploded in my body. The last thing I remember was seeing dirt explode all around me while a third grinning, eye-covered seraph filled the rest of my vision.