CARETAKER was ready when Zarathos appeared at the bottom of the pit. She felt him expose the abyss of famine at his core, as she’d expected he would, and opened herself in turn, letting the Abbey’s dimensional energies pour into the howling empty space. The light magic was anathema to the demon, burning, painful, eating tiny holes through his essence. Zarathos tried to close himself, but Caretaker kept him pried open, drawing a thousand layers of magic from the Abbey’s stones and driving it into his fathomless guts. The steady power whittled at him, forced him into a defense that would drain his resources.
The shrieking demon crashed into a rough wall at the side of the new pit and Caretaker pushed him into the rock, levitating down into the giant misshapen new cavern to keep up the pressure.
Lightning struck the trees just south of the pit, and Magik called that she had it. Caretaker felt Limbo’s energy open overhead, a crash of lightning, a blast of heat, and the smell of Limbo’s smoky air. She heard the other Suns following her down into the rocky opening, fanning out around the hidden vault, but her full attention stayed on keeping Zarathos pinned. The demon writhed and spat as she pushed him another three feet into the crumbling rock. He beat holes in the stone, jagged cracks rippling outward from his giant fists, but he couldn’t keep her out.
Caretaker sensed the wisp of seal left and renewed her intention. She would keep Zarathos at bay for long enough, whatever the cost—
A demonic portal opened above her and chaos spilled through.
* * *
SATANA felt the shield give and Zarathos charged out to fight, furious at the interruption, leaving her and Fenn alone with the vault.
“How much longer?” she asked, wincing when she felt Zarathos open up and then get hit with a torrent of flavorless old energy, a thousand intricate designs of power channeled like a firehose. One of the Suns was giving the demon a thorough thrashing, and the rest of the team was moving in.
“Two, maybe three minutes,” Fenn said.
Dammit! Two or three minutes too late. She didn’t mind the Suns taking Zarathos out of the picture, but she needed to stay in, and she had about two seconds to come up with something. She could portal out but the Varkath Star would fall to the Suns, and that wasn’t an acceptable outcome.
The eternity pits.
It would drain her almost completely, but she could eat when the Star was in her hand. If she didn’t do something big, the Triumvirate was over.
Satana opened herself to home and tore a hole to the deepest, oldest pit in her realm, where she’d thrown the ugliest, most vile, violent creatures that had ever walked her slice of Hell, her enemies and former friends, her mistakes, her exes.
She had to step away from the vault to open a rift in the chamber, and she shielded herself and moved before she could overthink it. She was hidden right in front of the glowering Suns, all of them alive and well, the old witch off to her right, driving Zarathos into the wall like a reluctant nail. Magik and the child floated next to the Ghost Rider, the handsome vampire leading them with a sword in his hand. His nostrils flared, and as close as he was, she wouldn’t stay hidden for long.
Go go go! Satana channeled her essence and ripped a wide portal in the low roof of the new chamber, between the Blood hag and the wriggling Zarathos. Killers and beasts, powerful demons and dumb actresses spilled out onto the rocks along with a load of picked and splintered bones. The soulless prisoners were starving, bloodstained, raving, and they knocked the crone down and went after the Suns, more falling into the chamber, screaming and moaning. The stench of blood and decay exploded over all of them.
Satana turned back to the vault, exhausted but satisfied that she’d bought enough time—
—and was knocked off her feet by a whipping chain. She landed on the rocks, banging her precious elbow. Pain shot up her arm.
A charging screech demon ran for the Ghost Rider, its piercing cry deafening, teeth-rattling, and Satana had to roll out of the way, farther from the vault. The vampire dashed past her, swinging his sword at a scuttling jackal spider, its fangs dripping poison, and Satana ducked from his shining backswing, barely able to hold her glamour.
She inched back to the partly shielded chamber where Fenn huddled and the vault waited, while all around her chaos reigned.
* * *
GHOST Rider danced, the Spirit delighted by the variety of damned things that fell into the vault’s chamber. Demons, soulless, monsters that crawled and stumbled, flew and oozed, tumbled out of Hell and into his path, and he let loose. A kick to the throat of a gabbling blood angel, a punch to knock the head off a shrieking scarecrow, a swinging chain sweeping all six legs from under some kind of matted tiger thing. Robbie and the Spirit engaged in a spectacular beatdown of the wicked, fire singing in his veins.
Blade dashed back and forth through the motley army of the damned, slashing throats, spilling guts, rotten blood slinging off the shining blade. Magik had Zarathos against the wall, but the demon was screaming spells, pulses of darkness blasting through the dirty air like indiscriminate punches. Nico and Caretaker were chanting together, zipping the open rift closed, amputating limbs off a dozen dropping monsters.
Robbie put his back to the vault and took on all incoming: a pair of one-horned bruisers, another squatting, leaping screech demon, a madman with a pair of bone spears. Ghost Rider cut them with his chains, knocked them screaming with Hellfire, whipped them into the walls, the ceiling, each other.
Zarathos shouted another spell and a bolt of lightning slashed through the room, zapping Magik. She fell out of the air and Blade flashed to her side, lifting her away from a trio of monstrous obsidian spiders that had dropped from the Hell portal. The flying spiders ejected streams of smoking poison, shooting through the whirling dust in inky jets, but Blade and Magik were gone before the liquid hit the stones.
Don’t mind if I do. Ghost Rider whipped a chain at the nasty threesome, the shining blade at its tip plunging through their bloated black bodies. He slung them at Zarathos, cackling when the nasty things splattered across his ugly face.
Magik shook off the hit while Nico blasted a half dozen of the soulless creatures with the Staff, fiery purple light gathering around her in a radiant burst and arrowing out of its eye, disintegrating the corrupt flesh of the attacking monsters.
Robbie tackled a sinister-looking dog-faced beast, the demon’s jaws snapping and sliding off his leather. He pounded its snarling mug and chucked it at a thing that looked like a ball made out of fangs and bloody wax.
“Protect the vault!” Caretaker shouted. She was back at the arch-demon, binding his jaws closed with a web of white magic. Zarathos ripped it away and reanimated half the corpses of the soulless, mortal and monster alike, throwing their maimed bodies back into the fight.
The Spirit of Vengeance caught the familiar, rich, good smell of the succubus suddenly, the same one who’d stabbed its Rider, and locked on. A shadow against the wall behind him, close to the vault, a blur between the stumbling damned. Robbie slashed at the open, empty space with both chains.
Satana Hellstrom flickered into view, shrieking, batting at the chains that had wrapped around her upper arms, and Robbie grinned, jerked her away from the vault’s chamber.
“Nooo!” She tried to shake off the links, but she was barely stronger than a mortal and he held her easily. She smelled like sex and food and victory, but her expression was agonized.
“I got the succubus!” Robbie called.
“Blade, get John Doe. He’s at the vault!” Nico shouted, the Staff’s eye arrowing light at something that looked like a pink pterodactyl. “Hurry, the seal’s about to go!”
“On it!” Blade called, and the Spirit of Vengeance felt something change in the air, a snap of Hell energy flashing through the gore-streaked stones.
Zarathos and Satana both screamed and broke free.
* * *
WHEN Fenn was alone, he tapped at his signature copier, mimicking the dying seal on the vault. His newest device projected the mystical “scent” of the magic holding the vault closed; his sensor couldn’t distinguish between the real magic and the false scent—exactly as he’d planned. The mystics he’d worked with were all new, still training, but they’d performed marvelously throughout his work with the Triumvirate, getting him to Satana, charging his gamma shields, setting up alarms. The quality of the spells they were working with surely had something to do with it.
And all credit is down to me.
Outside the stone barrier that mostly hid him from the chaos, unseen monsters shrieked and spat, the Midnight Suns beating down Satana’s minions, Zarathos lashing out at the witches and getting lashed in turn. Satana was howling.
Fenn waited for the vault’s seal to expire, anxiously watching his sensor tick down the real time. He sat the projector next to the vault, between the vessel and the violent ruckus taking place just past the thin wall that Zarathos had erected, and wedged pieces of rock under the suspended box. Now was the worst moment, the final crawling seconds. Fenn held his breath, his thoughts on repeat.
Grab it push the button grab it push the button—
The seal on the vault failed a half second after his sensor told him it would, and the top of the metal box dissipated all at once, not even a flash of light or a puff of dust. The loose rock beneath crunched, angling the vault a few degrees. The contents lay across a roughly tanned hide, radiating power that even he could feel.
The spell was written on a flat sheet of parchment, inked in blood. The shield was a rough hammered circle of shining metal, an amalgam of steel and copper with a broad X etched across the top in blackened lines. And the amulet, the Varkath Star, was a deep blue stone set in a cage of silver, a shining chain coiled around the egg-shaped pendant. It was stunning, simple, the stone pulsing with hidden depths of power.
Fenn took the item of greatest value, slid it into his jacket’s inner pocket, and punched the button on his bracelet, which did two things at once: black chemical smoke poured from the signature projector, and his exact coordinates were sent to a trio of mystics at a farm in Romania. They’d been preparing for days. If they pulled it off, his would be their first successful transport. If they didn’t, he was dead. But they would succeed. He’d dreamed it.
A gloved fist punched a hole in the barrier, and Fenn saw a flash of red eyes through the ragged opening and ducked into the billow of smoke.
Come on, come on—
Fenn’s skin tingled all over and he just had time to grin before he was carried safely away, the screams of demons following him into the dark.