Reaver

Twenty

Son of a bitch!

Reaver was going to destroy that archangel. Somehow, if he survived the darkmen, he was going to make Raphael pay for this.

He tossed the sheoulghuls onto the cabin’s dirt floor, but Harvester snatched them up. “It’s too late to get rid of them. The enchantment has already marked you as a target.” She shoved the crystals back into his pocket. “I think I know a way to fix it, but we have to go.”

She said it as if he wasn’t aware of the urgent need to get the hell out of here.

A shrill, wet scream came from outside. The darkman was closer. They were out of time.

“We can slip past while the demons are distracting him.” He shot her a glance. “You ready?”

“No,” she said so nastily that he knew her nap hadn’t smoothed the way for reasonable dialog about their past. “I was thinking I’d take up knitting while I wait for him to kill me.”

He ignored that and held out his hand to her. “Come on.”

With a blatant sneer at his offer, she brushed past him and slipped out into the throng of carrion wisps.

Swearing quietly, he followed her as she crept around the skinny demons and used the trees and brush as cover.

“We need to head north.” Harvester shoved a fat, leafless branch out of the way and darted into the shadows. “Toward the mesa in the distance.” A crossbow bolt, no doubt made of aurial material, impaled a tree trunk mere centimeters from his head. “Shit—Reaver, you’re glowing!”

Reaver wheeled around in time to see another bolt fire from the darkman’s crossbow. He dove at Harvester, taking her down as the bolt screamed over their heads. Reaver rolled behind a fallen log and blasted the asshole with a stream of hellfire that drained every last bit of Reaver’s power.

The flames caught the darkman in the torso, knocking him backward and sending his crossbow flying.

“The glow’s gone,” Harvester breathed.

“Good.” He already had a bull’s-eye on his chest. There was no need to add neon lights and a flashing arrow pointing at it.

Reaver shoved Harvester down the path they’d started on, but she stopped so suddenly he crashed into her.

“Lucifer,” she gasped. “I can feel him.” She gasped again. “Oh, shit. I can feel my father, too. He’s ahead of us.”

An icy fist closed around Reaver’s heart. “How close?”

Terror flashed in Harvester’s eyes as they shifted to the darkman, who was up and charging in their direction. “I don’t know. Close. We have to hurry.”

“Won’t we be exposed when we hit the Scythe Plains?”

“We’re stopping before we get there. But we need to run or Satan’s army is going to cut us off.” Harvester took off at a jog, leaving Reaver no choice but to follow. “The entrance to Persephone’s Playground should be over the next ridge.”

He stumbled like a toddler learning to walk. “Persephone’s Playground? It’s real?”

“Yup. No violence allowed. If we can get through the barrier, the darkman can’t hurt us.”

“What about your father?”

“He’s the exception to the ‘no violence’ rule.”

Figured. Satan was the exception to every rule.

They pushed hard, running where they could, scaling inclines when they had to, and once wading through a river that ran red with the blood of something extremely large that had been wounded or killed upstream.

They reached the ridge as another darkman topped the knoll, his white teeth flashing inside the pitch-black hood. Reaver didn’t hesitate. He tackled the thing as it loosed a razor-sharp disc designed to separate heads from bodies before returning to the thrower. They went down in a heap of fists. The darkman tried to wriggle free, his shadowy substance creating a slippery hold, but Reaver had to hang on. Darkmen had few weaknesses, but physical combat was one of them.

He pounded the darkman in the face—at least, what should be his face. There was nothing under the hood but a mouth.

The thing let out a silent scream that Reaver could feel like a million stinging nettles digging into his muscles. He hit it again, hoping to shut the bastard up, but the stinging only grew worse.

“Reaver!”

He cranked his head around just as the darkman who had been chasing them struck Harvester with a summoned club. She launched sideways and plowed into a tree, snapping the trunk in half. Wood splinters showered them, raining down hard enough to give a vampire nightmares.

But Reaver wasn’t a vampire, and he snagged a thick stake out of the air and brought it down through the darkman’s gaping mouth, pinning him to the ground. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would hold him long enough for Reaver and Harvester to get out of there.

If they could neutralize the other assassin.

In a black blur, the darkman launched a blade. The weapon sliced through the air on a collision course with Harvester’s heart. Reaver shoved off the staked darkman and lunged. Searing pain ripped into his shoulder as the dagger clipped him on the intercept. He landed next to Harvester and careened off the jagged stump she’d created when she’d crashed into the tree.

“Bastard.” She snarled at the assassin, kicking out her legs and catching the darkman in the ankles. He didn’t go down, but his attempt to keep his balance gave Reaver the opportunity to pluck the dagger out of the ground where it had impaled itself and hurl it back at the creature.

The blade caught the assassin in its nonface, and the sensation of stinging nettles wrapped around him again. At Harvester’s hiss, he knew she was getting the pincushion treatment, too.

“Come on,” she rasped as she tugged on his hand. “We need to get inside Persephone’s Playground.”

His backpack had fallen off at some point, and he grabbed it as they bolted past the two thrashing assassins. Harvester released him to scale an incline. At the top, she came to a halt next to a massive crystal carved into the shape of a goat-headed demon skull.

“There.” Harvester pointed down, into the bottomless canyon that dropped sharply on the other side of the ridge. Creepy animals clung to the sides or skittered in and out of crevices and holes, and in the darkest rifts, glowing eyes stared out.

“There, what?”

Harvester bit into her wrist and dripped blood onto the crystal carving. Crimson rivulets ran down the skull’s forehead and into the eyes and nostrils and finally reached the pointy teeth. There, Harvester’s blood was sucked inside. Next to them, an opening and staircase appeared out of thin air, disappearing into the canyon.

“Let’s go.” Harvester leaped into the chasm and took the stairs two at a time. Crazy female.

The opening and stairs disappeared behind them as they ran, leaving them in an earthen tunnel, and Reaver wondered what would happen if they turned around and tried to go back up.

“Do you hear that?” Harvester looked over her shoulder at him. “Music. We’re almost there.”

“I wasn’t expecting a concert.” Laughter and voices joined the sound of music.

Harvester stopped on the stairs as the tunnel gave way to a huge, cavernous area filled with hundreds of species of demons, colorful tents offering food and drink, jewelry, toys, weapons, and a lot of things Reaver couldn’t identify.

“It’s not a concert. It’s a market,” she said. “But it’s not just any market. You know how, in the human realm, there are places where evil gathers to see blood spilled at dog fights or to sell human children? Well, in Sheoul there are places where nonevil people can meet with their own kind and not be judged.”

“So none of these people are evil?” He eyed a tall, white-haired Neethul male testing a sword edge at a yellow tent nearby. Most Neethuls made their living in the slave trade, and those who didn’t still found vile ways to support themselves.

Harvester shrugged. “Oh, he’s evil. But just like a Christian white-bread male might fall to temptation and sneak out for a night of drinking and debauchery, people like the Neethul sometimes get the urge to be rebels and visit the other side of the tracks now and then. The good side.”

So this was an evil being’s version of rebelling. No doubt all the evil ladies got hot for a rebel “good boy.”

Reaver frowned. That didn’t even sound plausible.

“So what now?”

“Now,” she said, “I should leave you to fend for yourself. Yenrieth.”

He was wondering when she’d start up on him again. He had a feeling he was in for a long, long day. And an even longer eternity.

“You wouldn’t do that,” he said, and she snorted.

“Clearly, you don’t remember all the times you pissed me off.”

Actually, one memory did flare up, a time when he’d teased her about screaming like a little girl when a suckling pig burst out of a forest where they’d been hunting hellrats. She’d blown her stack, whacked him with a summoned stick, and stormed off.

“I know you’re capable of it,” he said, “but I know you won’t. You want answers too bad.” Answers he doubted he could give until he had his full memory back.

“Arrogant ass,” she snapped. “Come on. We need to get the darkman enchantment from the sheoulghul removed.” She waved him forward. “This way.”

They picked their way through the crowd, weaving between tents and demons, and just when Reaver thought he’d seen it all, he nearly jumped out of his skin when a fangy demon dressed like a clown popped out of a box as they passed by a circus-themed tent.

Harvester cocked a black eyebrow at him, and heat flamed his cheeks. “Clowns are freaky,” he muttered. “And demon clowns? Man, they’re in a freaky category of their own.”

“Aw.” Harvester shot him a snarky, fake pout over her shoulder as she slipped between two demons haggling over the price of some sort of fish. “Reavie-weavie is afwaid of a widdle cwown.” She trailed her finger along the rim of a wine barrel as they passed. “Speaking of Limos, you know, your daughter, how are the Horsemen?”

Awkward. Reaver suddenly felt like his boots were crunching on eggshells.

“They’re fine,” he said warily. “Limos is pregnant.”

Harvester looked back at him in surprise, and with the tiniest hint of a smile. “Good. She’s been wanting that for a long time.” She turned into another row of tents. “Do they know about me? Who took my place as Watcher?”

“They don’t know,” he said. “I thought if I told them they’d want to help me rescue you.” He side-stepped to avoid getting shouldered by a hell mare someone was leading through the market. “Your replacement is a douche named Revenant.”

Harvester skidded to a halt and wheeled around. “Revenant? That puffed-up, ill-tempered hellswine?”

“I see you’ve met him.”

She snarled. “That by-the-book hardass has been after my job for decades. He even tried seducing me, as if I’d give up my job after enough orgasms. Fool.”

She jerked her hair back from her face so hard it had to hurt, but what Reaver really wanted was for Revenant to hurt. Just because.

“Does he know he can’t insult Limos without getting the boys all riled up?” she asked. “He needs to know that. And he really needs to know not to mess with Battle. Ares’s stallion hates fallen angels. Although I guess it’ll be funny to watch him learn that on his own.” She laughed as if picturing the scene in her head. “Ooh, and I can’t wait for him to mess with Than’s vampires. Thanatos will hang Revenant from the southwest tower of his castle for that.”

“Not likely,” Reaver said. “Watchers got a defensive upgrade to protect against angry Horsemen.”

“Really?” Harvester scowled. “I could have used that once or twice.”

“I know,” he said quietly.

“You don’t know anything,” she snapped.

It had been nice to chip through the layer of ice that encased her, but now they were back to the way it had always been. Him trying to get through to her, and her putting up walls as fast as she could.

She spun back around and moved even faster toward wherever she was going.

“I know what Pestilence did to you.” He could guess, anyway.

“Yeah? Good for you. But compared to what my own father and his minions have done, Pestilence was a little boy playing at war spoils. I’m over that trauma, so shut up about it.”

Yup, she sounded over it. But not being completely dense, he didn’t voice that thought.

She stopped in front of a black tent, where a humanoid female was arranging beads on a string, chanting as she worked.

Harvester spoke to her in a language Reaver didn’t know, and a moment later, she turned to him. “She can remove the tracking enchantment. But it’s going to cost both sheoulghuls.”

He lowered his voice and spoke into her ear. “Without the non-enchanted sheoulghul, I can’t recharge down here.”

“If you’re dead you can’t recharge either,” she pointed out. “Unless you have anything else in that backpack to bargain with, it’s both sheoulghuls or nothing.”

Damn. This was bad. He hadn’t been able to hold onto much power or he’d glow, but every little bit helped. If he couldn’t recharge, he was going to not only be fully dependent on Harvester, but he would be a liability to her as well.

Some rescuer he was.

Cursing to himself, he handed over the sheoulghuls. The shopkeeper smiled like she’d won the lottery as she carefully took the crystals and secured them in a leather pouch that looked suspiciously like human skin.

Man, he hated demons.

The shopkeeper disappeared inside her tent, and when she returned a minute later, she was carrying a bowl of green paste.

“Give me your hand,” she said, and Reaver did as she’d demanded.

Harvester propped a hip against a tent support, her stance relaxed and casual, but he didn’t miss the way she was watching the crowd like a hawk, her sharp eyes assessing every individual who walked by. She was so different from the young, innocent Verrine, who, no matter how many times he’d told to be alert to her surrounding, would get distracted by the smallest things, like a butterfly landing on a flower.

The sudden memory and wash of tender feelings made him jerk as the demon poured the green stuff into his palm. She glared, wiped spilled drops off her hand, and continued, starting up an incantation that made his ears ache. He glanced over at Harvester, but if she noticed the painful buzz, she wasn’t letting on.

The demon ended on a high note that made Reaver wince, and then he damned near shouted when, out of thin air, she produced a golden nail and punched it through his hand.

“What the—” He cut off with a strangled yelp as she yanked the nail back out.

Blood poured onto the ground, and her voice became a clipped, harsh bark. “Done.”

His bleeding stopped, and in an instant, the hole sealed.

Harvester pushed away from the tent support. “You’re clean. Let’s go.” She took his hand and started to jog. “Daddy’s here.”

Reaver’s gut hit the floor. “Here? As in, inside this place?”

She nodded. “I felt him operate the entrance.”

She picked up her pace until they reached a series of portals in the wall. Harvester stopped in front of the third one, its opening constructed from the giant bones of gargantua demons and larger than any of the others, at least as wide as a semitruck’s trailer was long.

“What’s this?”

“It’s another Boregate. Sort of.” She took his hand with only the smallest of dismissive sneers. “We have to walk through together or we’ll end up in different places.”

This didn’t sound promising. “What do you mean, different places?”

“I mean that there’s no map inside. This Boregate drops you wherever it wants to. Could be anywhere in Sheoul, though it usually takes you someplace that makes sense. It’s almost as if it reads your needs. But every once in a while they’ll drop you in the place you least want to be.”

“Like your father’s realm?”

“Exactly.” She smiled with exaggerated perkiness. “But the good news is that he’s not there right now. See? I can see the bright side of things.”

“You’re a real ray of sunshine.”

“That was uncalled for.” She tugged on his hand. “You ready?”

No, but they didn’t have a choice. They stepped through the gate and into what appeared to be a black box.

“Now what?” he asked as the gate snapped shut. And remained shut.

Harvester didn’t answer. Didn’t have to. The expression on her face said it all.

They were trapped.