Baptisms of Fire and Ice Read online

  Guilt welled up in Adara’s throat, choking off her air. She’d met the angel less than an hour ago, and he’d likely given his life for her just so she could have the nearly nonexistent chance to save the city—and the world—from the demons who were trying to claw their way out of Hell.

  He’d lived for thousands of years as a beautiful, immortal being blessed by God. But he’d been willing to let that grand existence get snuffed out by his enemies to protect a mortal woman he barely knew because he thought she was worth the ultimate sacrifice.

  Her. Adara Caine. A woman who’d never been important or influential. A woman who had no idea how to handle a situation even half as stressful as this mess. A woman who now possessed a power she didn’t understand and couldn’t control, a power she wasn’t particularly keen on using.

  Selaphiel offered himself up on a platter to that demon to save a virtual nobody, she lamented, all because I was randomly hit in the back by a shard of God and then stumbled into a situation where I instinctively tapped into its power. If I fail to fix the cornerstone spell and stop the demons from breaking through, all the faith he placed on my shoulders will be squandered. And if I end up dumping an angel’s last will and testament in the garbage because I can’t perform well enough to see it through, I’ll never forgive myself.

  She had to fix the cornerstone spell. She had to.

  For Selaphiel. For Edgerton. For Earth.

  Chapter Twelve

  Adara turned the corner onto a street ruled by madness.

  As she’d closed in on Hudson and Grail’s, the unsettling quiet of the nighttime streets had given way to ghostly echoes of pain and fear. Lurid shouts from angry men. High-pitched shrieks from terrified women. Grunts of exertion and resounding thuds. The splintering of doors and the sound of breaking glass. Noises that all added up to a litany of nasty crimes in progress on the very street where Adara had decided to seek aid in the form of her best friend and his generous employer.

  She pressed on anyway, having nowhere else to go except a hotel or a squat. She didn’t want to check in to a hotel because it would mean surrounding herself with other people. People who had no idea that something otherworldly was prowling through the city streets. People who had no weapons with which to defend themselves. People who didn’t have the wherewithal to defend themselves when faced with an enemy they could not comprehend.

  As for a squat, well, Adara wasn’t keen on putting herself in a position where she could encounter other squatters. Not because they couldn’t defend themselves, but because they could—and would. “Career” squatters were very territorial, she’d learned during an unfortunate encounter that involved an axe, a can of mace, and two cops with tasers.

  So the bar it was.

  Hudson stowed a sawed-off shotgun and a baseball bat behind his bar. She figured that any of the “pillagers” who were foolish enough to walk through the bar’s door would be in for a surprise.

  She was right on at least one account, she discovered when she slunk around the brick wall of the bicycle shop on the corner of Minnow and Dowell, keeping herself tucked into the shadows of the overhang. Someone had tried to break down the door of Hudson and Grail’s, and they had indeed gotten a face full of buckshot for their trouble.

  The burly man, both arms sleeved with bad tattoos, lay on his back on the sidewalk in front of the door. He’d been shot at close range, and his head had practically disintegrated. A fine red spray decorated the concrete, fanning out like a perversion of a halo. At its center was a congealing pool of blood, his stump of a neck still dribbling.

  The sheer level of gore sent bile surging up Adara’s throat. She had to pause for a moment and take slow, deep breaths to prevent herself from vomiting up all that popcorn and beer she’d munched on earlier. She pointedly looked anywhere but at the dead man, fully aware she’d have to step over him to enter the bar. And as her gaze darted to and fro, she picked out the other crimes currently unfolding across the neighborhood.

  Half a block down, two men in ski masks were raiding an electronics store. They had seven TVs, twelve laptops, and a myriad of other equipment piled up in some shopping carts they’d stolen from a grocery store a few streets over. They were still picking through what was left in the store, taking their sweet time to make sure they got all the best pieces for the five-finger discount.

  Farther on, along a stretch of road where the streetlights had fizzled out—or been knocked out—a host of figures dressed in black were engaging in an array of illegal activities. A few were looting a clothing store. A couple were clearing the shelves of a pharmacy. And one of them was holding an unlucky man at gunpoint in front of an ATM at a bank, forcing him to withdraw as much cash as he could and hand it over. Or else.

  Adara had known there’d be plenty of looting after the impact event. But she’d never seen such crimes committed so brazenly by so many people at once. There were over a dozen criminals total, all of them masked, all of them working so fast and so methodically that she wondered if they belonged to some kind of gang.

  There wasn’t much in the way of organized crime in Edgerton. But there had been a buzz in recent months about groups of roving delinquent youths who were trying to style themselves in the fashion of real gangs by committing strings of misdemeanors. Maybe these youths had seen the impact event as their chance to score major “street cred”?

  Adara’s attention drifted back to the dead man in front of Hudson’s. Since he had no face, she couldn’t tell if he’d been a “youth.” But whoever he’d been, he’d certainly gotten more than he bargained for.

  Strangely, the rest of the criminals didn’t seem too concerned about the cooling corpse. Which meant they weren’t concerned that Hudson would emerge from the bar and chase them out of the neighborhood with his gun and bat. Either Hudson had made it known he wouldn’t touch anyone who steered clear of his bar. Or…he’d already been dealt with.

  Shit. If enough people rushed the bar at once, they could’ve overwhelmed one man with a shotgun.

  Adara leaned to the left to get a better view of the bar’s entrance, and found the door was hanging slightly ajar. She couldn’t see much through the crack, the interior of the bar dimly lit. But she caught a glimpse of overturned tables and the telltale glint of broken glass on the floor. And behind all of that, something large and distinctly humanoid, sprawled out in front of the bar itself. A man. A man who wasn’t moving.

  There was no way of telling if the dead person was Hudson at this distance—though the man did have the right build—so she would have to get closer if she wanted answers. But that meant crossing the street. In plain sight of all the frenzied criminals down the road.

  If Adara wanted to be pragmatic, she’d simply have turned around and retreated the way she’d come, found some other place, a safe place, to settle down for the night. But Adara had come to Hudson and Grail’s specifically because Enzo was here.

  Enzo, her best friend, who didn’t have a violent bone in his body and whose self-defense skills were about as sharp as a toddler’s. Enzo, who had almost certainly been inside the bar when the probable attack occurred, and who might at this very moment be lying dead or dying on the floor.

  Adara was committed to saving Edgerton from the impending demon invasion. But she wasn’t going to throw away everything that mattered in her regular life. And Enzo mattered. He mattered more than anyone else. Because he’d been the one to pull her through the aftermath of her father’s awful death.

  Enzo had been there for her.

  Now she would be here for him.

  Adara peeled herself off the wall of the bicycle shop and dashed across the street at a moment when all the crooks were either inside buildings or facing away from her. Though her heavy pack bogged down her speed and maneuverability, she managed to reach the darkness underneath the bar’s awning before anyone turned her way.

  Careful not to make any sounds as she crept along the front wall of the bar, she gingerly stepped over the dead ma
n on the sidewalk and swung into the entrance, using the end of her gun’s barrel to nudge the door all the way open.

  The interior of the bar was still. Unnaturally still. It was that heavy, oil-slick stillness that always fell over a room after a shocking event had occurred. As if reality itself became warped in the face of suffering.

  Reality certainly looked warped at least, felt Adara, as she struggled to reconcile the bar’s current appearance with what she’d always known.

  Half the tables in the main room were on their sides, along with dozens of chairs. Glass mugs lay broken on the floor in thin puddles of beer. Nine patrons, all of them regulars, who’d come out for a drink even on a day like this—especially on a day like this—were sprawled out on the floor or slumped over in booths. All of them had been shot with a small-caliber gun, heads and necks and chests riddled with weeping holes.

  Hudson himself was indeed the body who lay before the bar. He’d been shot twice in the chest and then once point-blank in the forehead. From the angle of the shot, Adara could tell that his killer had stood directly over him and looked him in the eye before pulling the trigger.

  This was not the work of common crooks. At least one person in this group was a serious criminal. A dangerous criminal. One who was taking advantage of the confusion caused by the impact event to wreak his own special brand of havoc.

  If this were any other day, the cops would’ve shown up by now, she thought. But Edgerton has a modest police force, and they’re currently overtaxed. The leader of this gang, or whatever this group is, he knows that and he’s taking advantage. Extreme advantage.

  But why attack a bar? Surely a bank or a jewelry store would yield more…

  Oh no.

  Crouching in the doorway between active chaos and cooling destruction, Adara had a terrible revelation. Enzo had once told her that Grail, Hudson’s business partner, a curmudgeonly old man who didn’t have a great deal of faith in banks, always kept a huge amount of cash in the safe built into the wall of his office in the basement of the bar.

  A safe in a bar would be easier to break into than a safe in a bank, or any other institution that took a serious interest in asset security. So if you were a criminal looking to score a big payday before the overburdened small-city cops could catch up on their post-disaster backlog, then a place like Hudson and Grail’s would make the perfect target.

  Since the bar wasn’t exactly a high-end establishment, there were probably plenty of lowlifes who hung around frequently enough to hear the gossip about Grail’s cash stash. One of them, or an acquaintance of theirs, she was sure, had hatched this plan to storm the bar.

  Dread settled in her gut like a lead weight.

  Grail only worked at the bar three days a week, and this wasn’t one of his nights. So the criminals couldn’t have taken him downstairs to open the safe. With Hudson dead on the floor, that meant they’d either decided to try and open the safe on their own, using a brute-force approach, or they’d taken one of the bar’s other employees captive, assuming he might know the safe combination.

  Enzo was the only other employee who worked on Tuesday nights.

  “Oh hell,” she murmured to no one but the dead, “I’m going to have to kill somebody, aren’t I?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Four men crowded the doorway of Grail’s narrow office, and none of them looked happy.

  Adara squatted in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs, her shotgun clutched in her hands, her hunting bow strung across her back, quiver at her side, and a serrated knife with a five-inch blade tucked into her boot. She’d left her pack upstairs and had closed and barred the entrance to prevent any other curious criminals from snooping around the place until she was finished with this bunch.

  As she’d tiptoed down the squeaky stairs, she’d worried about what “finishing” with these thugs would entail. Now, as she watched them from the shadows, her amorphous fears came into stark, cold focus.

  All four men were at least twice her size, their biceps bulging, their necks thick and corded, their overly stretched skin sporting a dozen or more badly drawn tattoos. She immediately pegged them as ex-cons, and got the impression from their hushed bickering, full of swears and punctuated by the occasional hawking of spit right onto the concrete floor, that these were not the sort of men who were rehabilitated by a nickel behind steel bars.

  These were the sort of men who treated freedom and prison like a merry-go-round. Around and around they went, bouncing from one felony to the next. Until they were either handed a life sentence or ended up dead in a gutter from a “job” gone wrong.

  They clearly didn’t anticipate tonight’s job going wrong, despite the fact that they must’ve planned it in a matter of hours. Only two of the four were appropriately armed. One had a pistol tucked into the back of his waistband, and the other had a hunting rifle decorated with camo paint. The other two had pocket knives barely longer than Adara’s middle finger.

  These crooks had seen opportunity after the impact event sent the police scrambling. They’d simply armed themselves with whatever they had on hand before they headed out to rob the bar.

  Adara wasn’t sure if these men were part of the group of looters and muggers farther down the street; none of the four were wearing ski masks or hiding their faces in any way. But even if they were, the bar’s walls were so heavily insulated to cut down on noise pollution that the gunshots wouldn’t be heard beyond a dull thump out on the street.

  If and when she started shooting at these thugs, no one outside would come running to back them up. She only had to determine a way to take down all four before they took her, and then she’d be golden.

  If only the actual planning was as easy as the premise, she thought as she wiped her sweaty palms on her pants. All these men are bigger than me, well versed with deadly weapons, and they have Enzo as a hostage. How on earth can I kill or incapacitate them all without getting shot, or getting Enzo shot?

  From twenty feet down the hall, she couldn’t parse the men’s full conversation. The gist of it seemed to be that they were growing impatient because Enzo was taking too long to crack the safe. Adara couldn’t see Enzo from her position on the stairs, as the safe was set into the wall on the left side of the office, out of view of the door. But she could hear him over the men’s continual grumbling.

  Every now and again, he let out a whimper or a Spanish swear. He was probably working on the safe as slowly as he could without arousing suspicion from his captors. Because he knew as well as she did that these men weren’t planning to let him live.

  He was only alive now because he was useful. He knew the combination to the safe that would let the men score their big payday. The minute they got their hands on that cash, Enzo would end up just like Hudson.

  Adara eyed the man with the handgun, who was staring intently into the office, no doubt directly at Enzo’s back. He was more composed than the others, his posture ramrod straight, his head held high. The leader of the group, and perhaps the mastermind behind the robbery.

  This was the man who’d shot all those people upstairs, and he probably hadn’t blinked once while doing it. A stone-cold killer.

  “What the hell is taking so long?” said the man with the hunting rifle. “The combo can’t be that many numbers.”

  One of the men with knives spat, “Hurry up, you dumb fag, or I’ll shove a blade up your ass.”

  Adara bristled at the slur. Oh, you just shot to the top of my list, pal.

  The leader raised one of his hands, and the other men fell silent. “Have a little patience, Rick,” he said with a touch of dark amusement. “The poor kid’s working with one eye after all.”

  She stifled a gasp. Oh Christ. What did they do to you, Enzo?

  “He’ll be working with no eyes if he gives me another faggy smile,” muttered Rick. “He’s lucky I didn’t gut him upstairs.”

  Adara almost pulled the trigger on her shotgun right then and there. White-hot rage sparked to life i
n her chest, and in moments morphed into a raging inferno that had her picturing all these men dead and bloody at her feet.

  But she didn’t shoot. Not yet. Because if the men’s attention wasn’t fully occupied by something other than Enzo, then Adara’s best friend would end up a casualty of her recklessness.

  She couldn’t let that happen. So she tucked her trigger finger away, lowered her gun, and demanded that her rage quell itself, if only for a couple minutes.

  It took every ounce of self-restraint she possessed to retreat up the stairs.

  The outline of an audacious plan was budding in her head. To make it work, she needed to use a handful of the “resources” available in the main room of the bar.

  The gory scene greeted her once more at the top of the stairs. This time, her stomach didn’t stir. She set her shotgun on the bar top and retrieved two things from her pack. A buckshot round and a length of twine.

  Setting those next to her shotgun, she hefted her pack on and hurried over to the exit. Cracking the door open, she peeked out at the street to see if any of the looters were hanging nearby. She found that most of them had moved farther down the neighborhood, having run out of stuff to pilfer from the stores nearest to the bar.

  Stealing through the darkness, she hurried along the side of the bar’s exterior, around to the small back lot, where deliveries were dropped off each morning. She set her pack next to the cellar door that led to the basement storeroom at the end of the same hall where Grail’s office was situated. That done, she sprinted back around to the entrance, checked to make sure none of the men had come up the stairs, and slipped back inside, closing and barring the door behind her once again.

  Knowing that Enzo couldn’t stall for much longer, she began to set the stage for her plan. After swapping one of the birdshot rounds for the buckshot round, she pinned the shotgun between two of the beer taps lining the wall, using one of the pump lines as a makeshift rope to tie the weapon down. Then she attached the twine to the trigger in such a way that it would be yanked back if someone tugged forward on the rope.