Baptisms of Fire and Ice Read online

  The trigger set, she rounded the bar again, unfurling the length of twine as she went, and headed to one of the few upright tables in the room. Ducking under the table, she gently pulled the twine taut and tied the end around one of the table’s sturdy legs.

  The next step of the setup was the most distasteful part.

  She shuffled over to Hudson’s body and maneuvered around the puddle of blood behind his head so she could reach the left pocket of his jeans. In the pocket, she found his cell phone. She plucked it out and swiped to unlock the screen—there was no password set—revealing that Hudson had been texting his wife in the minutes before…before all this happened.

  Adara paused for just a second, to honor Hudson’s memory.

  Then she got back to work.

  She opened the internet browser and googled the term “text-to-speech free online.” Pulling up the first result that wasn’t an ad, she found herself looking at a simple prompt. A box to type text and a submit button.

  Here comes the tricky part, she thought.

  Adara jacked up the volume on Hudson’s phone to the max and carefully typed one word into the text box. She copied that word twenty times in a row and made sure there were periods between each iteration so the text-to-speech program would pause the same way a person would.

  After a quick proofread, she set the phone on the same table to which she’d tied the length of twine, cautiously stepped over that twine, and tapped the submit button on the phone’s screen.

  The phone screeched out, “Rick! Rick! Rick! Rick!”

  She scurried over to the tiny alcove next to the stairwell door and flattened herself against the wall. Breath held, pulse sputtering, she listened to the sounds drifting up from the basement. Startled shouts. A barrage of questions. And finally—footsteps. The footsteps of two different people charging up the stairs.

  The man with the hunting rifle emerged first, sweeping his gun from left to right. Rick himself followed hot on his comrade’s heels, knife gripped in one meaty hand. They both halted a few steps from the stairs and scanned the main room, squinting in the dim light.

  Neither turned around, so they didn’t see Adara tucked into the alcove. They also didn’t see the length of twine strung across the floor.

  Eventually, they pinpointed the source of the repeating “Rick!” shouts from the dulled light of the cell phone’s screen. After exchanging a baffled look, they waltzed right on over to the table.

  When they were halfway there, Adara crept around the edge of the alcove and into the stairwell. As soon as she was out of sight of the room, she tugged her bow off her back, drew an arrow from the quiver at her side, and rushed down the steps as fast as she could without making noise. An awkward dance on the old, warped stairs.

  Three steps from the bottom of the stairwell, she nocked the arrow.

  And that was when the shotgun went off with a mighty boom.

  Adara jumped over the last two steps, landed in an archer’s stance, sighted her target in the blink of an eye, drew the bow—and loosed.

  The arrow zipped down the hall and struck the leader in the chest, just as he was yanking his handgun from the waistband of his pants. He fumbled the grab and dropped the gun on the floor, staggering back into the doorway of the office, one hand clutching at the shaft protruding from his ribs.

  The remaining man, shocked at the sudden developments, moved to grab the gun a moment too late. Adara nocked a second arrow and shot him in the back while he was bent down. The man collapsed, gasping as his punctured lung deflated.

  Adara sped down the hall and snatched up the handgun before either of the stunned men could grab it. Pointing the gun at the leader’s face, she said in a low and dangerous voice, “You make one wrong move, and I’ll kill you.”

  The man, skin now deathly pale, sank to the floor in front of her. But his face spoke of no fear. Only fury. “Bitch,” he muttered, blood dribbling out of the corner of his mouth. “I’ll slit your throat for this.”

  “You’ll have to be alive for that,” she replied.

  The man opened his mouth again, but his words were drowned out by a heavy, wet coughing fit. Before he had the chance to try a second time, someone else inside the office spoke in a tone that nearly broke Adara’s heart.

  “Adara,” said Enzo, who was black and blue and bloody. “Is that you?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The men had beaten Enzo to a pulp.

  One of his eyes was swollen shut, the entire left side of his face one giant, mottled bruise. His lip had been split right down the middle, and half-dried blood was smeared across his chin. His nose appeared intact, thank goodness. But one of the men had wrenched his diamond earring out and nearly torn his right earlobe in half. So the side of his neck was covered in a river of blood.

  And finally, his wrist—the wrist on which he usually wore a woven rainbow bracelet—was dislocated and bent far out of alignment. There was a darkening bruise on his skin right where the bracelet should’ve been. Someone had ripped it off.

  Adara’s rage broke through all her restraints. She wheeled around and drove her foot into the leader’s face. His nose imploded under her heel with a satisfying crunch. Blood gushed out, drenching his chin and chest. His head snapped back and hit the door, hard enough to knock him silly. He lost his grip on consciousness and passed out on the floor.

  Adara turned to face the other man, the one with the arrow in his back. Who’d been not so subtly reaching for her legs to try and trip her. She didn’t know what sort of expression was on her face, but apparently it was spine-chilling. The man scrabbled backward across the hall and curled up into the fetal position.

  “Please,” he begged. “No more. I’m done.”

  She growled, “You damn well better be.”

  Threat delivered, Adara turned back to Enzo. He was on his knees in front of the exposed safe, the faux wall panel cover set against the desk behind him. She examined his legs for any obvious injuries and saw none, so she slipped her bow over her shoulder and offered him her hand. “Can you stand?”

  Enzo took her hand. “I’m a little dizzy, but I think so.”

  With her as an anchor, he managed to rise on his wobbly legs. He then braced his shoulder against the wall and released his death grip on Adara’s hand. He took a series of deep, stuttering breaths as the adrenaline from his near-death experience began to wane.

  “Thanks for the save,” he whispered. “I thought I was a goner.”

  “Anytime, Enzo,” she said, trying to hide her churning anger behind a warm smile.

  She wanted to keep kicking the shreds of life out of the two thugs in the basement, wanted to march upstairs, retrieve her shotgun, and empty five more rounds into Rick the homophobe and the man with the hunting rifle. But she knew the most important thing right now was to get Enzo to safety.

  She couldn’t let her negative emotions override her compassion or her common sense. Her father had taught her that when she was no taller than the kitchen table at their old house in South Carolina: if you let your anger get the best of you, you always lose the fight, one way or another.

  She glanced at the leader, who would never live comfortably now that she’d completely crushed his nose.

  That was enough vengeance for tonight. It was time for recovery.

  “I don’t know if the other two are dead or just delayed,” she said quietly. “We should get going. Do you have the key to the storeroom door?”

  Enzo partially shook himself out of the stupor that had him wavering on his feet. He seemed to be moving in slow motion as he replied, “Yeah, it’s in my pocket. They didn’t want the beer. Just the money.”

  “Well, get the key out and head to the storeroom.” She backed into the hallway, her stolen handgun pointed at the stairs to the main room. “I’ll cover you in case one of them comes down for another round.”

  Enzo took a moment to register her words. Adara started to worry he’d gained a concussion from the punch to his eye.r />
  “We’re going out through the storeroom?” he asked.

  “You don’t want to go upstairs,” she said. “Might be dangerous. In more ways than one.”

  Enzo stared at her, uncomprehending, for several seconds. Then he remembered.

  “Hudson,” he murmured, his bottom lip trembling.

  “I’m sorry, Enzo.”

  He bit his lip, hard enough to reopen the tear, and fresh blood dribbled down his chin. “They were going to kill me,” he said so softly she almost missed it, “because they didn’t want any witnesses. But Hudson stood in the way and wouldn’t let them, so they shot him instead.”

  Adara internally lectured herself about the restraint lesson all over again. Still, she barely stopped herself from turning around and kicking the leader until he was nothing but a flesh balloon full of broken bones.

  “Hudson thought you were worth saving,” she said to her hurting friend, “and I agree with him. So let’s get you out of here and go somewhere safe.”

  Enzo steeled himself, suppressing a full-body shiver, and pushed away from the wall. He almost tipped over, and Adara held out her arms so she could lurch forward and catch him. But he caught himself at the last second and used the momentum to exit the office.

  He shambled down the length of the hall, digging the storeroom key from his pocket. At the door, he leaned over and groped for the lock. It was dark down here, and he could only see out of one eye, so she didn’t chide him for taking so long to—

  A series of loud thumps sounded on the stairs.

  Adara threw her focus back to the opposite end of the hall just as the man with the hunting rifle tumbled down the last few stairs. The buckshot had caught him on the left side and ripped his skin to shreds. His face was a bloody mess. One of his ears had been sheared clean off. And there were a plethora of holes in his upper left chest that suggested he wasn’t long for this world.

  Even so, the man was able to keep his body moving. If not elegantly, then effectively. He rose to his knees at the bottom of the stairs, and in one swift motion, lifted his hunting rifle and pulled the trigger.

  Adara slammed herself into the wall as the gun went off. The bullet zipped past her face, so close she felt the force of it cutting through the air. It continued past her, all the way down the hall, and ate into the door of the storeroom. Exactly where Enzo had been a second before.

  He wasn’t there now, however. In fact, he wasn’t anywhere in the hall.

  There was nowhere else to go in the basement. So Adara assumed he’d gotten a burst of speed from the shock of the man’s appearance and ducked inside the storeroom before the man pulled the trigger. But if that was the case, then why hadn’t she heard the door open?

  The storeroom door was heavy, and it sat on old, creaky hinges. When you opened it, it usually made an awful banshee screech and—

  The man swung his rifle toward Adara, and she tugged herself out of her bewilderment. Self-defense now, mystery-solving later, she thought and lifted the handgun.

  She wasn’t adept at shooting pistols, but she knew the general drill: Shift into a solid stance. Stabilize the gun with both hands. Take aim at center mass. And pull the trigger.

  The little .22 barked at the same instant the hunting rifle went off with a bang. The bullet from the rifle clipped Adara’s right arm, spraying blood across the hall. The handgun round hit the man in the chest, just off center, boring a hole straight through his sternum.

  He let out a gasp and fell backward onto the stairs, the bullet having found a home in some important organ or another. Adara, meanwhile, spun into the wall and hissed at the burn of the bullet wound.

  She’d never been shot before. It hurt.

  And here I thought I was supposed to go into shock and feel nothing until a dramatic moment, she thought mockingly, remembering the plots of a dozen different prime-time police procedurals. So much for that.

  The man on the stairs was trying to sit up despite his injuries and ready his gun once again. Adara was getting pretty tired of shooting people tonight. So instead of waiting for the man to come around for another duel, she scuttled down the hall to the storeroom door and turned the knob.

  The door didn’t open. It was locked.

  “Uh, Enzo?” She banged on the door. “You locked me out.”

  His muffled voice came through the dense wood. “Sorry. Give me a second.”

  Adara glanced at the man on the stairs. He was almost to his knees, his breathing ragged as his damaged body tried its hardest to refuse his commands. He grasped his rifle with one hand and hefted it high.

  Adara could tell from his look of smoldering hatred that the man was planning to pull the trigger not once, not twice, but as many times as the extended magazine would let him send bullets flying.

  “Enzo!” Adara called out, more frantic.

  “Almost there,” he replied, his voice a touch louder. He was just on the other side of the door.

  Adara aimed the handgun at the man, her finger slightly depressing the trigger. “Come on, now. Don’t make me kill you.”

  “Don’t care if I die,” he spat, “as long as I take you down with me, you…Rick?”

  A second person—it was indeed Rick—came falling down the stairs. He landed in a heap at the base of the stairs, right beside his friend with the rifle.

  Rick was in no better shape than his buddy. He’d taken quite a bit more damage from the shotgun blast. He probably wouldn’t survive the night, given how many holes the buckshot had punched in him.

  Apparently, he’s decided to get his revenge before he croaks, Adara surmised, as he was holding her shotgun, which still contained a birdshot round.

  Or perhaps not, she amended a moment later, when it became clear that Rick was not paying attention to her at all.

  He was staring at something at the top of the stairs with a look of utter horror on his bloodstained face. Something that was making a bunch of strange and inhuman noises…

  The thing at the top of the stairs let out an ear-piercing shriek, one that Adara knew all too well. The shriek of an imp.

  Oh shit. They found me. The demons found me, she thought. But how did they find me? I haven’t used my god shard. I—

  The storeroom door opened with its trademark creak. Adara scrambled backward into the room, but she didn’t immediately slam the door. Her gaze was glued to the scene on the stairs. She couldn’t tear herself away.

  The imp leaped down the steps. Rick raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger. A desperate attempt to blow the ugly monster away before it brutally killed him.

  Unfortunately for Rick, the shotgun that Adara had failed to clean these past few months completely jammed. So all that Rick could do was scream as the imp landed on his chest and wrapped its preternaturally strong hands around his neck.

  The imp violently shook Rick by the throat, repeatedly slamming his head against the back wall. It took exactly three seconds for Rick’s neck to snap, killing him instantly. It took another three seconds for his skull to cave in and for brain matter to gush out onto the stairs.

  The imp, satisfied that Rick was dead, dropped his limp body and slowly turned to face the frozen man with the hunting rifle. It let out a sound halfway between the buzz of a fly and the hiss of a snake. A puttering, droning laugh. Then it lunged at its second victim.

  “Oh god,” shouted the man with the arrow in his back, whom Adara had completely forgotten about. He was still lying in the hall, unable to stand, unable to run.

  “Don’t leave me here,” he pleaded to Adara over the screams of the man with the hunting rifle. “Please, please, don’t leave me here!”

  Adara closed the storeroom door and locked it tight.

  “Enzo,” she breathed out, “we need to go. Now.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Adara,” Enzo said, “what the hell was that?”

  He was sitting on the floor, staring at the door she’d just shut, with a look on his battered face that lay somewhere
between total disbelief and absolute terror. Normally, Adara would’ve shared the whole truth of her troubles with Enzo on the spot, but this was not a normal situation. They weren’t at the campus coffee shop, sipping tea and eating croissants. They were in the basement storeroom of a bar after escaping from a group of murderous robbers, and there was a literal demon out in the hall, ripping those robbers to pieces.

  The man with the arrow in his back screamed at the top of his lungs, the imp having finished with the other man on the stairs. That piercing scream abruptly cut off a few seconds later, and something fleshy rammed into the storeroom door. Adara’s gaze dropped to the bottom of the doorframe. Blood seeped through the crack and spread into the room.

  She took two steps back and said to Enzo, “Can you take a rain check on your question?”

  Enzo, face drawn and pale, replied, “That’s all right. I’m not sure I want to know the answer anyway.”

  Adara helped him to his feet again. “Come on. We need to hurry. There might be more of them, and I don’t want to give them a chance to block off all the exits.”

  He didn’t answer, but he didn’t protest either, and when she tugged his arm, he moved in the right direction. So she slid her hand down to his, interlaced their fingers, and led him through the narrow aisles of the storeroom like a dog on a leash.

  All the emotion on his face had drained away, and he bobbed along with half-lidded eyes and slightly parted lips. Shock. His brain couldn’t figure out how to process this traumatizing situation. It had just shut all his emotions down and left him a practical zombie.

  Adara gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. “We’ll be out of this mess in a few minutes. I promise. Then we can get you medical attention, followed by food and rest. How’s that sound?”