Chapter Ten
This is never going to work, Casanova thought, panicking, as several nearby demons turned their way. They were short and squat and had too many limbs, and he had no idea what either of them were. But they looked suspicious.
Or maybe that was him. He couldn’t tell anymore. He was pretty sure he was having a nervous breakdown, but since that wouldn’t help he concentrated on ignoring them. And on personifying his role as a recruit being escorted to the job by the big boss herself.
Which would have been vastly easier had said boss not hit the damn wall every five seconds.
“Stop it!” Casanova hissed.
“I don’t know how to drive this thing,” Rosier complained, his tail making little furrows in the dust as it swished back and forth, propelling him into a corner.
“Then figure it out!”
“There’s a bit of a learning curve,” he muttered, slithering back a few steps. And then smacking straight into the wall again.
Casanova leaned over and grabbed a scaly arm, jerking him back into the corridor. It was a broad one, which would have done positive things for his claustrophobia if it hadn’t been full of demons. And the hellish equivalent of TNT. And a ten foot tall half-snake that was weaving drunkenly along, as if coming back from a night on the town.
God. That’s where he should be, right now, on the town. Any town. Or better yet, enjoying the nightlife in his beautiful casino. Pressing the flesh with high rollers, schmoozing with starlets, making sure it all ran smoothly, effortlessly. He was good at that—no, he was great at it, maybe better than anything he’d ever done in his life. He wasn’t so good at this, particularly not when it involved touching that hideous thing in order to keep up some semblance of—
“What are you doing?” he demanded shrilly, catching sight of Rosier’s current activity.
“Nothing.”
Casanova was momentarily speechless, disbelief and revulsion warring for dominance on his tongue. Revulsion won. “You were feeling it up?”
“She.”
“What?”
“Well, she’s obviously female,” one hand glided over evidence of that fact with every appearance of appreciation. “And I was merely trying—”
“It’s a snake,” Casanova said, horror making his voice quake.
“It’s a lamia, which makes it—her—a sentient being.”
“It has scales.”
The disgusting creature licked his lips. “Quite.”
“And it’s dead!” Dios, how many perversions was that in a single—
“It’s in stasis,” Rosier said calmly, “it isn’t dead. Although we’re likely to be if I don’t figure out how this body works.”
Casanova was beginning to think that was inevitable anyway. He’d been envisioning a quick trip through a few short tunnels, grabbing the damn mage and heading straight out the nearest exit. That rosy little vision had lasted all of five minutes, until the small side tunnels let out into increasingly larger ones, populated by pick-wielding demons who couldn’t all be mind-controlled. There was just too many of them; at least some had to be in on this, whatever this was.
He still hadn’t figured it out and he really didn’t care. Right now, he cared about exactly one thing. “Where is that blasted mage?” he said savagely, as he turned a corner.
And had the damn man slam into him, hard enough to knock him off his feet.
Casanova hit the ground, Cassie yelled “Pritkin!” and Rosier cursed. And then the crazy bastard was gone again, as if jerked back by some unseen wire. Leaving Casanova sprawled in the dirt with his ass in the air.
Which was not such a bad thing considering what was spread out all of a foot in front of his nose.
“Dios,” he breathed, his fingers digging into rock as he stared at the lip of a very narrow ledge. Over what appeared to be nothing at all.
Casanova peered cautiously over the rim to see a cavern the size of an airline hangar, if they were also a mile deep and carved out of glittering rock. Demons lined the deeply grooved sides, where jagged streaks of pure ore glistened silver-bright against the stone, like captured lightning. It looked like half the damn mountain was hollow, he thought, awed.
Right before he was hit by the rest of it.
He heard Cassie scream as their ledge was engulfed by an avalanche of debris, including dirt, rock and several sharp little pick axes, one of which bounced off his already abused ass. It took him a moment to dig himself out, only to find that everyone else had been smart enough to hug the wall. And were now staring with varying expressions of horror at something behind him.
He whipped his neck around in time to see that, for once, the danger wasn’t to him. The mage had just hit the wall in a billowing explosion of dust--on the other side of the cavern. How he’d gotten all the way over there, Casanova didn’t know, since he didn’t see a bridge. But that was less of a concern than the fact that they’d come all this way to rescue someone who had just gotten himself killed.
Only he hadn’t.
He should have been dead; hell, he should have been a greasy streak on the rock face. But instead, Casanova watched him spin, snarling, and launch himself off the side of the cave--straight into thin air. But instead of instead of plummeting who knew how far to his death, he soared up, which was clearly impossible unless the Shadowland had some crazy rule on gravity he’d yet to—
“Wait. Are those…wings?” Casanova asked stupidly, as Pritkin hit a fat little demon who had also been hovering with gravity-defying ease in the middle of a lot of nothing. And sent him smashing into the wall above them.
Most of which came down on Casanova’s head.
“Carlos! Get out of the floor!” Rian told him, as he struggled to fight himself free a second time.
He pulled his face out of the dust to glare up at her, grateful he didn’t actually need to breathe. “You know,” he said sarcastically. “That never would have—” he cut off as Cassie stepped on his head, scrambling over the mountain of debris towards Rosier.
She’d survived the double avalanche, but she looked a little worse for the wear, with a bloody streak glistening on one cheek and red dust coating her like a film. But that was nothing compared to her just-shy-of-crazed expression. Which might explain why she grabbed a fistful of those horrible tentacles, jerked Rosier down to her and screamed in his face.
“Do something!”
“What would you suggest?”
“Anything! Everything! He’s going to get himself killed!”
“He looks like he’s doing all right to me,” Casanova said sourly, dragging his filthy, torn and bloody ass over to the minutely safer area by the wall.
“He isn’t,” Rosier said shortly.
“How can you tell?”
“Watch.”
Casanova was, but it looked to him like the mage was winning. The fat demon dove for Pritkin, the air boiling around him like an angry black cloud, only to be sent flying into the midst of a half dozen miners. They’d been hugging a ledge, watching the show, but should have picked a better vantage point. Because they toppled like bowling pins, the pudgy demon sprawled in the middle of them, bloody and obviously hurting.
But Pritkin was, too, either that or he needed a breather. At least Casanova assumed that was why he didn’t immediately follow up his advantage. He hovered in the middle of the cave, the great white wings he’d somehow acquired beating the air, while his opponent writhed in pain and black smoke boiled around him.
Only it didn’t look so much like smoke anymore. More like a swarm of angry insects, which were pursuing the miners the demon had toppled. And while Casanova couldn’t tell what it was doing, every time it caught one, the miner screamed and dropped—and didn’t get back up.
“What’s happening?” Cassie demanded.
“Ealdris,”Rosier said grimly. “She’s feeding.”
“Now? But why--”
Rosier glanced at her impatiently. “Every time her associate is injured, she pulls energy from the s
urrounding life forms and feeds it to him. He can keep going indefinitely—or as long as the food holds out, at least. Emrys can’t.”
“Emrys?”
“John then,” Rosier said, gesturing violently. “Call him what you will, he is going to die if we don’t find a way to separate those two. Soon.”
“And how do we do that?”
“I’m thinking,” Rosier snapped.
“I can try,” Rian volunteered. “If I could drain her--”
“You’re not powerful enough,” Rosier said curtly. “I might be, but not through a body. That’s Ealdris’s talent, not mine.”
“But she doesn’t have a body right—”
“As soon as either of us attacks, she’ll simply draw back into Sid.” He made a disgusted noise. “Sid. You can’t trust anybody anymore.”
Casanova stared at him, a little awed at the arrogant irony in that statement. But he didn’t think this was the moment to point it out. Not when the fat demon—Sid, he assumed—suddenly jumped up and threw himself back into the fight, slamming into Pritkin and sending the two of them swerving and looping and diving around the space. And everywhere they went, the black cloud followed, buzzing around the war mage just as it had the demons who were now bleeding out on the ledge.
“He doesn’t have much time,” Rosier said harshly. “If we don’t do something soon, he won’t—”
He stopped on a gasp, a look of surprise coming over his features. Casanova didn’t know why until he looked down. And saw the gore-coated end of one of the picks sticking a good two inches out of Rosier’s middle.
It was a shock, but not as much as who was holding it. “What are you doing?” he asked Cassie blankly.
“Getting its attention,” she said savagely, and ripped the pick back out.
Rosier made a choked sound, everyone in the vicinity got sprayed with hot green blood, and an ear-splitting shriek echoed around the cavern. Right before the cloud whipped about in a swirling mass of vengeful fury. And dove straight for them.
“Thanks,” Rosier told Cassie, staring at it.
“Any time.”
He turned around and fled, and he must have figured out something about how his new body worked, because he wasn’t hitting any walls this time. Casanova felt a chill, deathly wind ruffle his hair as the cloud streamed past, ignoring the girl holding the gory pick in favor of the demon making off with its body.
And then, for a split second, there was nothing. At least, not in the threat category. Casanova stared around, first at Pritkin, who was currently making mincemeat of the small demon, then at the three of them, all of whom were still more or less intact, and finally at the distinct lack of any enemies that weren’t running for their lives.
And all right, he thought, straightening his tattered jacket. This was more like it.
And then the cave blew up.