An hour later, I was standing above ground with a group of Benny’s troops. The three orcs, decked out in battle armor, would lead the charge with their snub-nosed shotguns. Behind them, a dozen goblins would scale the walls and lay down cover fire while the dwarves and I broke through the front gate after the changeling blew the door clean off with a carton of C4. Meanwhile, the pair of elves perched across the street would take out the guards on the opposite roof. The whole plan should take less than two minutes beginning to end once we blew the door.

Candy wasn’t much of a fighter, so I convinced her to stay under armed guard with two troglodytes in Benny’s office. If we all survived, I would deal with her later.

“Don’t die,” Candy said to me.

“Very little chance of that,” I replied. “I’m quite hard to kill.”

She smiled. “I’ll bet you are.”

“Remember that, Candy.” I squeezed her hands tightly, almost violently. “That’s as much a threat as a fact.”

“I got it.” She turned toward the troglodytes, who brought her inside the drug store.

I motioned for the rest of the attack squad to gather around me. “Killing demons is tricky,” I said. “Benny equipped you all with special bullets made of black steel from the bowels of Hell itself. In a moment, I will bless and consecrate them. My mother was an angel, so I can do things like that.” I stared into the faces around me. “Before I do, I want to remind you that demons are fast and strong. They respect a show of force, but it also infuriates them. Demons are hard enough to kill when calm, and even if you do kill them, they just rematerialize in Hell. It might take them eons to get back out, but when they do, they’ll come back with a vengeance. So, don’t let them find out who you are, no matter what.”

I tapped my chest, then my head. “Two shots in the chest. One in the head. That should do it. Now, drop your heads.”

I held my arm up and chanted. “Yn enw’r tad, spn, a’r ysbryd sancaidd.” I made the sign of the cross and then spun on my heels. “Porth i Lili.”

I created a portal and, after the team had rushed through, closed it behind me. The elves were already halfway across the street by the time I stepped onto the hill, where I watched the changeling disappear from sight with his box of explosives. I brought the rest of the troops into an alley next to the compound.

A minute later, the elves flashed a light to signal that they were in position. I motioned for the others to follow, and we crawled slowly in the darkness toward the gate, hugging the wall. We were twenty yards away from the main gate when the door blew, sending fire into the air, just like we planned. We couldn’t see her, but the changeling could see us, and I told her to blow it when we were just outside of the range of the blast.

“Go! Go!” I screamed, and we charged the door. Gunfire rang out over me as two guards ran out from behind the gate. “Pigua obsidian!”

Huge metal spikes flew out of my hand and embedded in the foreheads of the two demons, sending them crashing to the ground. When I reached them, I looked up to see the goblins on top of the walls, firing wildly at the demons below them.

“We’re going in!” That was their signal to stop firing until we got to safety.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

I rushed forward and took cover behind a black van as the bullets flew all around me. The dwarves met me as the orcs charged, blasting their shotguns across the front lawn of the house. A lawn sculpture of a swan made of bushes exploded inches from my head as I ducked to avoid the blasts. Automatic rifles sprayed bullets down on us like rain from the roof, pinging the van with dozens of shells in mere seconds. When they had to reload, we had a small window to advance.

“Now!” I screamed when the orcs were past the front door. The dwarves laid down suppressing fire while I charged in after the orcs.

I kicked through the entrance and fired more spikes on two demons crouching behind a couch in a makeshift barricade. I assumed a fair few demons were inside, I just had to find them. The dwarves entered and took over so I could investigate. I turned the corner of a wood-paneled hallway, and a demon rushed out of the bedroom to greet me.

“Pigua obsidian!” I shouted and a spike embedded in its forehead.

“Clear!” I heard the dwarves shout from the front room. Outside, the orcs screamed the same thing. I met the dwarves on the other side of the hallway and took turns clearing the rooms and cleaning up any demons who remained.

“Only one room left,” I said. “Let’s hope he’s in here, and this hasn’t been an exercise in vanity.”

Something was wrong. It had been too easy, much too easy to storm this fortified compound. I didn’t understand why until I opened the room. Inside, I didn’t see a demon, but a woman, light skin, red eyes, and a smile that took up half her face when she opened her mouth.

“About time,” she said in an unsettling growl. She snapped her fingers, and the whole room went up in flames.

“Firestarter!” I screamed. “Porth i Lili!”

I leaped through the portal and dove to the ground next to Lily outside the compound as I watched the whole compound explode into a million pieces. “NO!”

The dwarves never arrived through the portal, and I had to close it before the fire made its way through. Few things frightened me, but firestarters pulled their fire from the depths of Hell, and my mother once told me it was one of the very few things that could kill us.

The blast only lasted a second, but it was enough to tear through everything. I waited for somebody, anyone, to come out from the ruins. To meet me, but there was nobody. I went through the rubble and found the charred remains of goblins, orcs, dwarves, and even the elves, who’d left their position once the grounds were clear to help secure the compound.

They were all dead.

I was so screwed.

It took until sunrise for me to get the courage to face Benny again. How was I going to tell him I’d gotten two dozen of his men killed and didn’t even get the demon bastard that had betrayed us both?

He was going to make my life a living Hell. He couldn’t kill me. I wasn’t worried about that, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t torch my standing with everyone in my Rolodex and then hunt me to the ends of the Earth. It would be a terrible inconvenience. Could you imagine drinking a coffee next to the Eiffel Tower and suddenly you had three armed gunmen chasing you down?

When I entered the drug store, the door to Benny’s office was open. Streaks of blood lined the shelving.

The poor pharmacist was bleeding out on the ground, white as a sheet. Another ambush. There was no way this was a coincidence. This was a coordinated hit. I rushed down the stairwell to find Benny. Too late. No longer was the rat king assembled as one fluid being. Instead, dozens of dead rats lay strewn around the room.

Around him, two troglodytes bled out with their boss, but there was no sign of Candy. Of course, there wasn’t, because she was a liar. And I vouched for her. Then I heard it—whimpering, coming from one of the sewer tubes.

I hopped up into it and followed the sound until it stopped at a sniveling Candy, who looked up at me. “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t—I would have died, but those two. They pushed me into the drain. Told me to be quiet. They—they saved me—”

I took her by the shoulders and shook her. “If you’re lying to me, I’ll rip you apart.”

She sobbed. “I’m not. I’m not.”

I grabbed her around the neck and shoved her toward Benny’s office. She jumped down, and I landed behind her. When I stood up, I saw a bull elk in a suit, standing on two legs, looking at me.

“What have you done?” he said, his voice trembling.

“It’s not what you think.” I held up my hands, but it was too late. He pulled his gun and fired at us.