The Protect Her Box Set: Parts 7-9 (9 page)

I felt a ripple of warmth down my spine as his words caressed my ear. It focused my mind on what I needed to do. I needed to walk forward. And then I felt my foot move as I stepped forward.

I forgot about the black ooze at my feet.

I forgot about the fact that Benjamin had betrayed me.

I forgot about the demons who blocked my path.

Riley was with me, and we would take care of this business once and for all.

As my mind focused on that, the relic in my hand began to glow. It knew where I wanted to go, and I just had to follow it. So I did.

CHAPTER NINE –
RILEY

I had to give my girl props. Once she set her mind on something, she didn’t hesitate. I liked to think that I had something to do with it. If she had told me that she’d rather go back and take on the dickhead archangel instead, I wouldn’t have blamed her. What was going on now was the scariest damn thing to happen to me since my short trip to Hell five years ago.

It was quickly apparent that not all of the demons could back away from us as we approached them. The tunnel was relatively spacious, which made sense considering there was a Hell Gate down here somewhere, but it was crammed full of demons of every variety. I had seen a fair number of them in my day, but my eyes continued to find ones in the mishmash that I had only read about it.

As a joke about a year ago, Klein started making his own demon trading cards. When business was slow, we played demon poker with our own personalized set of cards. If I didn’t have that background, I don’t know that I would have recognized at least a third of the contorted, twisted shapes surrounding me. I’d have to give Klein a kick-back of some kind for that free education.

Those were the random, nonsense thoughts crossing my mind as I followed Paige into the tunnel of madness. The demons that couldn’t back up were pressing themselves against the sides of the walls to allow us to pass. Still, in the confined space the sounds and smells were things that I hoped I would never have to hear or smell again once this was over.

I was also trying to ignore the dull pain that pulsed through my chest every few seconds. I didn’t want to worry Paige, but I was losing blood at a rather alarming rate. I didn’t want her to lose focus of the task at hand, and I had no idea the amount of energy she’d need to pull on and focus to close the gate. I could only assume that it would be more than she had attempted to this point, and I didn’t want her to risk losing any of that strength because she had healed me. I didn’t think Benjamin’s knife had hit any major organs or arteries given the fact that I was still upright, but I knew that adrenaline was an effective mask against my pain. Fortunately for me, the current situation had me on my toes.

“How are you holding up, babe?” I asked her. I felt the heat of anger and tension all around us. These demons would tear us apart if they could, and if the mythology was correct, many of them would happily eat the flesh off our bones as well. I wasn’t sure how familiar Paige was with the demons around us, but I hoped that was a bit of knowledge that she didn’t know. She had enough on her plate.

“I’m fine,” she said. Her voice sounded different. “I think it’s right up ahead.”

I kept my knife up, and I had my other hand on her hip. I wasn’t planning on letting go of either one. “How do you know?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just do.”

I had to admit that the sooner we figured out how to use the relic and get rid of it the better in my mind. There was no way to know how it would affect either one of us. I had deflected Paige’s question earlier because I didn’t want to let her know how worried I was about it. Anything that would cause every demon we were running across to turn from it should be something that caused extreme alarm. Demons were rarely afraid of anything, but they did have an acutely strong sense of survival. It was general practice that if a demon was running away from something, you ran away too.

But we had a job to do. It was a job that it seemed we were uniquely positioned to do, and I couldn’t shake that sensation again that we were just following a carefully crafted script written by someone else.

The demons were thicker in number the further we went in the tunnel, and I tried to ignore the fact that several times one of them got too close to Paige and the relic. Their bodies immediately began to twitch and melt just like the one that struggled with Paige earlier. I had bandied with the angels earlier about not believing that there was a difference between light and dark magic. I was starting to change my opinion. I wasn’t a fan of demons, and I’d as soon have a world without them. But even I had to admit that whatever the relic was doing to them seemed like a horrible way to die.

It was the ones that hung down from the ceiling that made my stomach churn the worst. Because I was taller than the average guy, there was only so far that they could scrunch their bodies upward to avoid contact. So I felt the brush of tentacles and fingertips whisper across the top of my head as I passed underneath them, but none of them attempted to grab purchase.

Because I was so focused on the woman in front of me and the relic in her hand, I didn’t immediately grasp the fact that all of the demons had fallen away to reveal a large cavern in front of us. But then Paige gasped, and my eyes were drawn ahead of her.

We exited the tunnel on a small ledge that was about ten feet off the floor of the naturally created room. The demons ahead of us backed right off the ledge and fell to the floor below which was crawling with what looked like hundreds more of their fellow demon companions. The buzz in the room diminished to a whisper as all of those eyes were drawn upward to me and Paige.

Past the sea of bodies, I finally laid eyes on the object of our mission. I wasn’t sure what I expected. The gate appeared to be several meters across and slightly taller than I was. The surface shimmered between a deep black and hue of red and orange that reminded me of flames. I knew from personal experience that the idea that hell was a place of fire and brimstone was all the Hollywood version of the place, but the concept of eternal damnation was entirely accurate. It wasn’t a place I ever wanted to visit again.

I felt a twitch in my mind then I recognized, and I felt stupid for not thinking of it before now.

“Any ideas of how to get down there without attempting a body jump across a platoon of demons?” Paige asked. “I have this feeling that if I let my guard down at all, they’ll swarm us.”

“I’ve got an idea,” I said. I moved to stand beside her, and I closed my eyes. What I was about to do was even bigger than what I had done in the church, and I hadn’t been wounded then. I felt Paige’s fingers intertwine in mine. Then I let my mind crawl deep into the dirt and stone beneath the demons’ feet.

This place might have been untouched until recently, but this had been the site of a battle many years ago. I could also tell that the demons crawling out of Hell weren’t always friendly to those of their kind. There were fundamental blood feuds between various factions of demons, and those hadn’t gone away as they were each released from their prisons in Hell. It just gave them another opportunity to go after their sworn enemies. There were fresh bodies littered everywhere underfoot.

The sense of oppression in the room was linked to the amount of blood and death that had occurred there. How fortunate that death was my specialty.

“
Rise, and take down those that stand in our way
,” I sent out as my call to action. “
You will fight for us.”

The screech of anger and pain began almost immediately. I felt Paige’s grip tighten around my fingers. “I can feel what you are doing,” she breathed. “It is…amazing.”

Amazing wasn’t the first word anyone used to describe what I could do. I could feel the push of many of the demons fighting against me. That was normal, but now it was just another thing that siphoned my energy away from the goal at hand. We needed the distraction for me and Paige to make our way through the fray.

I opened my eyes and focused my attention on the ground immediately below the ledge. Bursts of dirt shot up in the air as corpses in various stages of decomposition emerged from the cavern’s floor.

“This isn’t going to be a soft landing. You need to get on your feet as quickly as possible,” I said. I wasn’t giving Paige any time to react, but that was the way it was in the midst of a fight. You had to make a decision and do it. There wasn’t time to think about what happened next.

As soon as I saw a reasonably sized space open up as my reanimated army of demons cleared a path, I let go of Paige’s hand, and I jumped. I pulled my feet up against my chest so that I landed low to the ground. The impact jarred my bones and sent a ripple of agony through my body from the wound that I already had, but I ignored it. I had to keep an iron hold on all the corpses around us. Just like in the church, which seemed like years ago, I extended my reach to every demon that went down in the fight and yanked its essence into my chokehold of a command. I figured that for as many soldiers as I lost, I was gaining at least twice that because corpses didn’t feel pain. They could do nothing else other than what I commanded of them. And my command was to kill.

I didn’t see Paige’s jump, but I felt her presence as she landed next to me. She rolled to her side and was up on her feet with the relic held high a moment later. I saw a tentacle swipe out toward her torso, and I launched the knife that I had been holding ready. It sliced the air past her and nailed the tentacle into the stone wall behind her.

The only sign that Paige gave that she even noticed was a slight duck to the left that put her safely out of its reach. Our eyes locked, and she nodded to me. She saw the clearing in the mass of bodies in front of us, and she immediately moved toward it. I did notice though that she had a slight limp to her gait. I realized that she had likely twisted her ankle in the jump, but it wasn’t something that either one of us could tend to now. We had to get to the gate.

“
Keep them away from us
,” I commanded my undead army. “
If any one of them touches us, I’m going to send all of you into the ether forever. If we close this gate unscathed, I will allow you to return to your slumber unharmed
.” It was a far better deal than I had ever offered a demon that I pulled back from the dead.

The answer was a loud cacophony of moans in my head, but I dismissed them. Demons were inherently a whiny bunch. But I saw the opening in front of us widen, and Paige plunged forward. I was on her heels ducking to avoid the random swipes from longer than normal limbs that happened into our path.

It seemed like it took hours instead of minutes to cross the room. I was amazed that we were still in one piece when we got there. Even with the threats that I made to the undead, I knew that I had handed them a nearly impossible task. As the gate loomed large in front of us, Paige came to a stop.

“Do I see what I think I see?” How I heard her voice at all was a miracle.

The shimmering gate had turned completely red, but I could see swirling shapes of black that appeared to be on the other side.

“Reinforcements,” I said. “We gotta get that gate closed.”

“I don’t know how,” Paige said. Her voice held a note of barely controlled panic.

I stepped forward so that I was slightly in front of her between her body and the gate. Then I held out my hand toward hers that held the relic. “Use me to find the answer.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Riley. I don’t know what touching this will do to you.”

“I trust you,” I said. “You’ll keep me safe. You’ll keep both of us safe.” I looked behind her. I could see that the path that would take us back to the ledge was starting to close. At the same time, the shapes on the other side of the gate in front of us were starting to take sharper focused form. All hell was literally about to break loose.

“You gotta try, babe,” I shouted to her. “You’re the only one who can do it.”

Her face turned grim, but she nodded once. As she pushed the relic into the palm of my hand, and our fingers joined into a fist around it, she shouted back. “
We’re
the only ones who can do it.”

Instantly, I felt the taint of the relic on my tongue. It was a putrid taste that made me want to spit it out, but I held steady. I put my other hand up so that it was only an inch away from the gate’s surface. I took a deep breath. I could feel Paige’s energy building already. I was her conduit, but I also had to maintain the control I had on the troops around us.

I heard Paige begin to speak, but the words were a language that I couldn’t understand. I focused on her face. I tried to send her silent words of encouragement and love. She was my everything. I would do anything for her. If that required my life, I would accept that.

Her face paled as I felt the magic begin to course through my body to the gate. It was like nothing I had ever felt before. I heard the screams then, and they weren’t inside my mind. I didn’t know how I knew it, but whatever Paige was doing was killing the demons who had already escaped the gate. She was solving more than one problem in one fell swoop. Bodies began to fall to the ground all around us, but I barely noticed.

Sweat poured down my face as I struggled to keep my body upright. Between the expulsion of my energy and the full flood of unleashed magic that was coursing through me, my physical body, which was already wounded, was starting to falter. I remembered when Alice was training me how she warned about pulling too much magic beyond what could be controlled. It would overwhelm you. That was what would have happened to Paige if she had tried this on her own. I was sure of it.

I saw then that the edges of the gate were starting to darken and turn gray to match the stone walls that surrounded it.

“It’s working!” I shouted. I wasn’t sure if Paige even heard me. I didn’t see the arm that emerged from the gate’s surface until it was too late. It latched onto mine and, in one swift motion, yanked me through the gate.