Minerva sent the footage, but Tamerlane never mentioned it, and I was never reassigned. Minerva stayed in Manhattan fighting demis, while I went back to my team in Boston.
I had fucked up my skin pretty bad, healing so much damage so fast, so I spent a week taking it easy back home, working my regular shifts, but resting every minute I was off, letting Lydia rub Cecilia’s treatments into my scars.
So, I was in the bedroom when I was awakened by a sudden invisible tug on my tether with Lydia, a warning that came across like a telepathic shout of alarm.
I jumped out of bed and found Lydia in high alert mode. “Someone found us,” she said, with her head locked in place like she was looking at something through the wall. “Whoever it is, I can’t identify them, so that means they’re powerful, and smart enough to hide their aura.”
I was already throwing clothes on and putting my wards up. Lydia was by my side, prepared to fight with me, but I said, “No. Stay inside. The apartment wards are still working, and I don’t want you to reveal yourself unless you have to. Jump in and help if the fight seems close, but don’t show yourself if I’m winning, and if he drops me, run like hell.”
“I won’t leave you,” Lydia said.
“Lydia, I’ve been fighting demons for months now. I don’t want to reveal you unless I know you’ve already been spotted, and if they’ve sent something powerful enough to take me out, I need you to live. Please stay inside and be ready to run.”
Fearing the worst, I walked out my front door and found a demon standing on my doorstep, a demon I recognized, even before he said his name.
He looked like a large, but otherwise normal man with jet black horns and a jet-black tail. Demon horns and tails start as bright colors when they’re first made and get a little darker every time the demon kills somebody, so it usually took centuries for any particular demon to turn their horns completely black.
This was an old one, and he had spent the last ten years managing a human fortune on Earth. He fought most of his battles in the boardroom these days, and he still dressed the part, wearing black slacks, designer shoes, a huge, tailored suit jacket, and a thick gold sweater stretched over his massive chest.
“My demon name is Titus,” he said, following an ancient set of wizard rules.
Wizard rules required demons to introduce themselves and give any wizard the chance to make a deal before engaging in combat. It usually didn’t help.
“I am a lieutenant serving the Demon Lord Mammon,” he said, “and I’m here to give you one last chance.”
Titus was one of the most powerful lieutenants in Hell, supposedly thousands of years old, who had become a demon when the Roman Empire was still a thing. Lydia and I had defeated him, barely, in the early days of our time together, back when I only knew one spell.
The two of us got insanely lucky and were able to defeat him with a set of silver cutlery that had been blessed by multiple generations of marriage, turning them effectively into holy weapons.
Lydia had kept him busy while I jammed a dozen holy forks in him and sent him back to Hell.
And if you think that sounds ridiculous, well, then you probably should have started with the first book. I wasn’t surprised to see him, so much as I was surprised it had taken him so long.
I had humiliated this guy, and he had every reason to want revenge. But I wasn’t a terrified newbie mage anymore. I was a certified superhero who had been training with a goddess for months, so my face lit up in a big smile when I saw him.
“Hey man, am I glad to see you! I’ve got a hundred things I’ve been wanting to try with a real opponent! Can you try and hold me up by my neck again? I want to see if I can push down and break that with levitation.”
He started to say “Kovak…” but broke off, totally derailed by my response.
“And didn’t you work for Moloch last time? What happened?”
“You know damn well what happened,” the demon growled. “You sent me back to Hell and I got demoted down to Imp. But my new lord reinstated me and assigned me specifically to deal with you.”
“Okay, cool,” I said, popping my back and wiggling my arms. “What do you want to start with? If you don’t want to do the neck thing, we can just trade punches for a while.”
“Kovak, I’m here to give you a warning, and it’s the last one you’re gonna get. You have no idea what forces you’ve set in motion, or what’s about to be unleashed on this city, all because of you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I kept a close eye on your progress after you defeated me, and when I heard Psongor taking credit for the way you killed Baalphezar, I knew it was bullshit. I couldn’t get anything out of his soldiers or his harem, but I finally found one guy who knew the truth.
“Baalphezar’s old Inquisitor told me your destruction of his Master was a straight up contract violation, a mortal man spitting in the face of Hell for the first time in a thousand years. We got together and told that story to anyone who would listen, but nobody believed us, until you broke up Mammon’s drug lab, and called him out one on one.
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“Suddenly, all these lords who had mocked us wanted to know who you were, and the richest lord in Hell had a personal reason to want you dead.
“Truth is, Psongor had your back covered pretty well. Aleister and I were just a pair of disgraced renegades, telling this crazy story about a human wizard strong enough to defeat a prince in his place of power."
“Nobody believed us, so you might have gotten away with it,” Titus smiled, “if you hadn’t opened your big mouth.
“Mammon heard the whole story of how you called him out, then he started interviewing other demons who had had their shit busted up by a new guy on Bluestar 7, a hotshot wizard barely out of college, who was openly bragging about breaking a demon contract.”
“See,” Titus said, casually putting his hands in the pockets of his exquisite black coat. “You still might have gotten away with it, if you had just killed one big purple idiot on the first layer of Hell. But you didn’t just challenge Baalphezar, you challenged the system, and nobody gets to challenge the system.
“The minute you did that, our little wizard problem became a demon reputation problem, a matter of honor that threatened our hold over this whole planet.
“If word got out about what you did, and these super-powered idiots started to think they were strong enough to defy us… If every rich moron with a demon contract could just hire some super people to come down and brute force a renegotiation, well, there’s no way our Master could let that stand.
“If you were any other kind of super guy, we’d just be stomping your dick in the dirt right now, but you’re a wizard, and a Kovach, so I’ve been authorized to give you one last chance to do the right thing.
“Come back to Hell with me, take your medicine in the torture chamber like a big boy, then sign a new contract with my new lord. Tell everyone in Hell you were working for Psongor when you killed Baalphezar, and now you are a proud new recruit on Team Mammon, ready to kick ass and breed babies for us to the end of time.
“And Kovak, before you turn down another way too generous offer, understand that when people defy Hell like this, we don’t just punish individuals; we punish cities. We’ve been setting up this attack for months now, and Mammon is ready to spend big money to teach Boston a lesson.
“Mammon is not just the ruler of a layer in Hell, he is the living, breathing Bank of Hell, with access to more hoarded magic than any three other lords combined. He has been authorized to spend whatever he needs to make an example of you and teach every power player on Earth what happens when you let your super people get out of hand.
“We’re ready to kill thousands of people, Kovak. We’ve got the resources and the army to burn your city to the ground, and if you continue to defy us, we will wipe this pathetic monument to human arrogance clean off the map, until there is nothing left but a dozen arcologies, each swearing allegiance to one of our lords.
“We’re ready to turn Boston into a beachhead for a demon invasion of Earth,” he smiled, “and it’s all gonna be your fault.”
* * *
I opened my mouth to respond, and Titus held up a finger to silence me. “Kovak, can you keep your fucking mouth shut for once in your fucking life? You have twenty-four hours. Think about what I’ve said. Think about what you’ve done and think about the price you and your city are about to pay for that big mouth, before you try and open it again.”
Titus summoned a swirling black portal and stepped back through to Hell. I noticed the black swirls had a touch of gold to them now.
I didn’t panic right away, but I didn’t go in to see Lydia, either. I was afraid Lydia would tell me to run, or worse, that she might try and negotiate for me, maybe even sacrifice herself to get me a deal.
I caught a cab to the potion shop and went to see Denise Hardy. But Denise wasn’t there, so I had to walk in and admit to the meanest witch in Boston that I had just put her city in danger, and that her worst fears about me had all come true.
There was a good chance she would throw me on an altar and sacrifice me to faeries or something, but if it saved the city, maybe that was a price I was willing to pay.
* * *
This one was hard to watch in the mirror, because I didn’t walk in and handle Cecilia Hardy hero to hero like a grownup. I turned into a scared kid suddenly confronted with a mother figure, and started breaking down as soon as I saw her.
I was only able to say, “Mrs. Hardy, I need to…” before I started to cry. Not brave, noble man tears, not even young hero desperately holding it together tears.
I saw her face and was instantly eight years old again, walking down the aisle of a church I had never been to, to take one last look at my mother’s face before they put her in the ground.
I collapsed, red-faced and sobbing on the counter, until Cecilia came around to hold me, and sit me down at her little table for a cup of tea.
It took me a good ten minutes to explain what was coming and spill my guts about everything I had done. I gradually stopped crying and was able to keep my voice steady as I said the next part.
“So, if I do this, if I surrender to these things and take a new contract, can you kill me? Can you and Denise kill me, as soon as they send me back to Earth?”
Cecilia sighed. “You’re too young to understand this, but sacrifice is not a winning strategy, sweetheart. Life is not chess, and humans are not chess pieces. You are not going to surrender to these things. You are not the first hero to fuck up like this, and you are not the first hero to try and throw yourself into a volcano to fix it.
“But sacrifice doesn’t work. Picking the lesser evil in the short run always leads to a bigger one. And honestly, even if it would work, I am not inclined to let you off that easy. What you’ve done is so incredibly arrogant and stupid, the only suitable punishment is to keep you here and make you deal with it, right here on Earth.
“You are not going to surrender to these things. You are going to go out there and do what every other hero does when they fuck up. You are going to stand there and fight and pray that fighting will be enough. Now shut up, stop crying, and drink your tea. I gotta make a call.”
* * *
I didn’t get to hear the other side of Cecila’s call, but she made it standing right in front of me, like she wanted me to hear every word she said.
“Hey sweetie, I’ve got a full Code Red demon invasion of Boston coming in twenty-four hours and I need everybody you’ve got.”
A brief pause as someone on the other end of the line started asking questions.
“It’s Kovak,” Cecilia said. “He ran his mouth about breaking a demon contract and now they’re going to burn my whole city to teach us a lesson. The faeries aren’t gonna start a new war with Hell for me, so this is a human problem that’s gonna require a human solution.”
Took me a minute to realize this was Harrison Moore, and that Cecilia Hardy called the DMA liaison “sweetie.”
“Yeah, the portals were a test,” she continued. “We can assume each one is gonna be an invasion point. I think the count stopped at twenty-four.”
Another pause, and Cecilia said, “Yeah, I know. Can you fill the gaps with MRT? Will Tamerlane play ball?”
“Use my name,” I said, interrupting her. “Tell Tamerlane that Tim Kovak needs his help.”
Cecilia covered the mouthpiece of her ancient plastic phone and said, “Joseph Tamerlane knows who you are?”
“Minerva says he’s got a personal interest in me. I think he wants to use me for something.”
“Harry, did you catch that? Kovak has a personal connection with Tamerlane. It might be enough.”