I was dreading the call to Veazey, but Denise had been threatened directly, and I had to warn her first. She answered instantly, clearly out of breath. “Denise! Wherever you are, get to the shop, the demons know you’re with me!”

“Well, that explains a lot,” she said. “I appreciate the warning, but it’s a little late. Whoever’s after you lured me to an abandoned hospital on a fake animal control call. I’m trapped in a ruined building with a million demons outside. I’m dropping a pin for you. I’ve got no backup and B7 is a thousand miles away, so move your ass!”

I ran outside the Zone and summoned a cab from the priority lane. The ride to Hanson was only six minutes, but it felt like eternity. Denise was going to freak out if I arrived covered in my own blood, so I used the time to heal myself and clean up, using magic from the toolkit to clean and repair my clothes. This was the first time I had used cleansing magic. I looked and smelled clean, but it felt wrong somehow, like I wouldn’t really be clean until I got a shower.

Cranberry Specialty Hospital had been abandoned since 1992 and was somehow still standing, like someone had tried to restore it twenty years ago and run out of money during the Bump. It was the perfect place for an ambush, and an entirely believable location for a manticore lair, or whatever bullshit had lured Denise out here.

I should have been more concerned about an Imp smart enough to make prank calls, but I was too busy freaking out on the ride over, convinced that I was about to get her killed, and that I would arrive just in time to see her being ripped apart, or worse.

I tapped into the cab’s external cameras and saw the site swarming with demons as I approached. Baalphezar had summoned an army to kill or capture Denise, an army that he should not have been able to afford. “How are you paying for this, you son of a bitch? What did you sell?”

An invasion like this should have been enough to attract an angel, but I saw no signs of divine intervention as my car swooped in. I got directly over the roof on the surrounded building and was immediately furious as the vehicle tried to turn around, triggering an automated warning through the speakers inside.

“DANGER: A Code Red supernatural incursion has been detected in this area. This vehicle will now proceed to the indicated emergency shelter.”

I had never tried levitation from this high up before, and I had no clear plan for landing, but I cast wards and fortitude as fast as I could and kicked the passenger door off, watching it tumble down and bounce off the dilapidated red roof below.

Then I jumped, panicking for a second in free fall before I was able to catch myself. All those hours jumping from rooftops were finally paying off, as I dropped through a hole in the ceiling.

The demons were being held at bay by giant thorny vines that were growing on all sides of the building. It was damned impressive, watching Denise hold off an army of demons by herself, but there’s no way she could keep this up.

Is it vain to admire my own landing in Azael’s mirror? I remember this as my first real hero entrance, dropping through the roof and landing on one knee in front of her.

But if Denise was impressed, she didn’t have time to show it. “Thank god you made it,” she said. “You sure you’re up for this?”

“I have to be.”

Denise nodded and said, “Okay, what’s your fighting style?”

“My what?”

“Your fighting style!” she repeated. “Up close or far away?”

“Up close!” I said. “Really fucking close!”

“And how good are your wards?” she thumped my chest. “Can you tank these things?”

A strangely confident version of me said, “All day long.”

Denise said, “Block for me. I got your back.”

She rattled off “North, South, East, West” pointing at each corner of the building. “I’ll call targets! Get ready, they’re about to break through the south window!”

I didn’t have time to think about this when it happened, but watching it again, I was able to piece together a little of how Baalphezar pulled off this attack and confirmed a few things about the economy of Hell.

Demons come in such an insane variety of shapes and sizes; angels generally refer to them by job title.

Imps look like evil monkeys with tiny horns and tails. They serve as spies, messengers, and saboteurs. New Imps were considered menial labor in Hell, the first rank of demon that a human soul could be transplanted into. Lowest of the low among demons, but still better than being some random schmuck in the Lake.

In my experience, Imps are either very skittish and very quiet, or very clever and very talkative. Philo is the latter kind, talking a mile a minute in an exaggerated 20c accent, routinely dropping dead phrases like he’s very old.

Hunters are animal shapes, generally on four legs. The classic hell hound is a Hunter, made for running down prey and tearing things apart. They’re usually very stupid, although some can be as smart as dogs. I called Baalphezar’s Hunters “shark dogs” because they had a weird, unfinished look to them: smooth, gray, and lacking detail.

I used to think Hunters were animal souls, maybe evil animals that killed humans on Earth, but the truth turned out to be far worse. Hunter demons are human souls who’ve had their minds erased, all the way down to erasing their speech centers, mindless and mute, but somehow knowing they used to be more.

Enforcers are giant humanoids, usually between seven and eight feet tall, with exaggerated proportions and muscle tone. I saw a few of them in loincloths, but most of them ran around naked and hairless, with no genitalia at all.

Lydia told me genitals are handed out as a kind of reward in Hell, and that you have to earn them, unless you’re a succubus or an incubus who’s expected to use them for work.

Male demons outnumbered female ones by something like thirteen to one, roughly matching the demographics of the prison population on Earth. Did that mean the population of Heaven was overwhelmingly female? Azael refused to answer that one, like he found the question to be insulting somehow.

Most demons match the coloration of their creators or the Master who paid for them, but they’re not strictly color-coded. Some change their appearance to please their Master when they get upgraded to a new form, while those with minds are allowed to personalize themselves over time.

A demon’s coloration usually serves as a clue to who made them, so when a demon’s coloring doesn’t match the color of their Master, it means they were stolen or purchased or given as some kind of gift.

Sylvia’s coloration was purple and black over white skin because she had actually been created by Baalphezar and had been designed to complement his own black and purple skin, but his Inquisitor was yellow and Belak was green because they had been gifts from other demon lords that Baalphezar did favors for.

The demons working for Baalphezar were a weird mishmash of shapes and colors because they had been acquired at random over centuries, and he was simply not good at making his own.

The Hunters that first attacked me in the Zone were gray and featureless, like half-finished sharks, because they had been crafted in haste by a sloppy creator who had to rush them out the door. I didn’t know enough to recognize it at the time, but those Hunters were evidence of just how broke and desperate Baalphezar was when I picked a fight with him.

He was attacking me with knock-off surplus demons, bought in bulk and thrown at me like mindless animals, with no training at all.

Baalphezar didn’t attack me with a highly trained army of demon commandos because he simply didn’t have one. He’d spent the last seventy years fighting battles with forces he could not afford to replace, until all he had left were the demonic equivalent of factory rejects, guided by a tiny core of elite servants like Belak, who had been with him for centuries.

I mention all this because that is not the army that smashed through the windows to attack me and Denise. The Hunters that came pouring into that room were a grab bag of horrors - random animal shapes pushed together in a tangle of teeth, claws, hooves, and beaks. There was no common color or style between them, and no apparent coordination to their attacks.

And yet, some of them were obviously very old, old enough to have evolved into more impressive shapes - with extra fur, exotic skin textures, weirdly detailed facial features, and unique coloration that indicated many different Masters over many years.

Baalphezar had hired a platoon of mercenary castoffs from the Overlord of Hell - exactly the kind of scrubs and malcontents a king would send to help a prince he was not particularly happy with. Enough brute force to handle a troublemaker on Earth, but nothing that could be turned against him if they lived.

Some of those old fuckers were tough though, and Denise or I could have easily been overwhelmed if they had caught us alone. But we were not alone. We were finally together. The children of two ancient bloodlines, angry, desperate, and almost in love.

* * *

Denise yelled, “South!” and I just started swinging, punching a small herd of Hunters as hard as I could, over and over, until they were just a blur of fur and skin.

I remember being deafened by the sounds they made, like an angry zoo on fire - a cacophony of growls, roars, clicks, and screeches as I kicked, punched, grabbed, and smashed them against the wall.

I remember being astonished by the power of my own punches, feeling their skulls crack as their heads exploded, until the floor at my feet was just a pile of rainbow-colored meat.

Their bodies vanished much faster than Lydia’s did, disintegrating into puddles of energy that blew away in clouds of sparks. After a few minutes, there was no evidence of their passage except a shattered window and the crunch of dirty glass under my feet.

Denise was staring at me like she had never seen me before, peering through a lattice of vines that were slowly regenerating, now that nothing was hitting them.

“Jesus Christ, Tim! How are you doing this?”

I nodded as I returned to my position in front of her. She was in her little vine cage in the back corner of the room, leaving me to roam around and fight stuff in the middle.

“Long cast time to start,” I said, “but I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping stuff up. Should be able to punch and keep wards up as long as I have energy. I’ve got plenty of juice right now, so I’m liable to get physically exhausted before I run out of magic.”

A new patch of vines grew to cover the south window as the scratching on the west wall suddenly stopped.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

Denise yelled, “West!” as another batch of Hunters burst through the vines at the door.

The first wave had been easier, as the window kind of funneled them toward me and helped me aim for their heads. These were attacking more like dogs now, going for my legs and feet while others tried to leap and knock me over.

I remembered all those times our family dog had knocked me over and kicked those yelping bastards as hard as I could, realizing for the first time that wards made my sneakers hit like steel boots.

I was getting better at throwing them now, smashing monsters against the far walls on either side of Denise. Throwing seemed to be more efficient than punching them, since anything I threw to one side never came back.

I thought I was throwing them hard enough to kill them, until I realized Denise was picking them off before they could get up. I saw her throw her arm out and caught a glimpse of a glowing amber bullet flying out of her hand. The magic pellet hit a demon like a large-caliber impact, knocking it back until its whole body just disintegrated and blew away.

I should have known; the demons weren’t coming back because I wasn’t doing this alone. I was blocking the door and throwing monsters left and right, setting up a perfect shooting range for Denise. She was getting more confident as she learned my movements, flinging pellets closer and closer to me, until she was able to pick off a squirming, slavering wolf-thing that I was barely keeping off my face.

But before I could catch my breath, Denise yelled “East door!” as the next wave broke through. I still had one giant dog thing left in front of me, so I grabbed it and kicked like I was punting a football. My foot crashed through its jaw and embedded in its head, so I had to hop backwards to free myself.

While I was busy finishing him off, the wave from the east was trying to tear through the vine cage around Denise. She was shooting little amber pellets as fast as she could, but a single pellet wasn’t enough to put one down.

A sickly green shark dog got between us and leaped at her face. I spun around and did a move copied straight from the old Captain Cobalt cartoon, slapping either side of its head until my palms met in the center. No one was more surprised than I was when it worked, popping its skull like a pimple and spraying demon innards… all over Denise.

Most of the gore was deflected by her vines, but a stream of bloody debris had splattered on her face and the top part of her blouse. Denise gagged and started to retch, yelling, “Ugh! You got brain in my mouf!” as she spat.

“Sorry!” I winced as I yelled back, picking off the last two who were clawing at the sides of her cage.

Denise wiped her eyes and yelled, “North!” just fast enough for me to whirl around and catch some kind of bright red panther thing with a snake head. It got close enough to break two fangs on my neck before I grabbed opposite legs and ripped it apart.

The vine walls around the building were growing back more slowly as Denise ran out of magic, so she reached one arm through her cage and yelled, “Tag me!”

I grabbed her hand and a surge of magic flared between us like a stroke of lightning. I was astonished by the power of it, the way the combined thrill of combat and attraction surged and turned into raw magic. We lit up like a pair of road flares and our auras just… merged.

My aura was white, hers was amber, and now we were both kind of warm white, like two old-fashioned light bulbs, brighter and stronger together. Denise fired one of her pellets at a demon coming through the west door and it was shining pure white, like she was using a bit of power that had come straight from me, without joining her aura first.

It was more intimate than sex for a moment, to see Denise killing something with power she got from me. Time froze for a second as we looked in each other’s eyes, then we were interrupted by a roar as a giant bulbous head poked through the vines behind us.

Denise and I spun in perfect unison. I quick-drew my pistol and put a bullet in one eye as she snapped her arm up and put a glowing pellet through the other, still holding onto my hand. The demon vanished as we turned to each other and said, “What are you shooting?” at the same time.

“Sacred wood shards,” she answered first. “Hits like a truck and they can’t regenerate. You?”

“Binary ten-millimeter with a grav compensator. I’m not great with it, but it works.”

“This room is a kill box, and they won’t stop coming,” she said, reluctantly letting go. “We have to find the portal they’re coming from.”

“Can you feel it?”

Denise closed her eyes and said, “Main gate to the north.”

“If I can get us there, can you close it?”

Denise said, “Yeah, but we gotta go through that!”

The north wall was a pile of multicolored demons stacked on top of each other to try and get through the vines. They had already torn a hole in the wall and were steadily enlarging it. In a moment, the whole thing would collapse, and they would come pouring through. No way the vines could stop a mass that big.

“Duck and cover!” I shouted. “I’m gonna make a door!”

I threw both arms out and Anson’s artillery spell went Whump! blasting through the north wall. Demons and drywall went flying everywhere as the blast wave launched everything up and away. A few of the Hunters hit the ground hard enough to disintegrate, but half a dozen others were already charging me.

I held up my arms to intercept the first one, but he was knocked back and destroyed by a supercharged amber pellet as Denise ran up behind me.

Denise yelled, “Call targets!” and I froze, because I had no fucking idea what “Call targets!” meant. She sensed my confusion and said, “Throw them up and away and yell which way I should shoot!”

So, I grabbed one and yelled, “Left!” Then grabbed another and yelled “Right!” Punted another one and yelled, “Center!”

Denise yelled, “Duck!” and launched a supercharged pellet over my head, vaporizing the demon as it was getting up. Then she smacked me in the back of the head and yelled, “Don’t throw center unless you’re already ducking!”

I mumbled an apology and kicked the next one as hard as I could, shouting “Left!” extra loud to pretend I wasn’t embarrassed.

Another minute of punting demons and we were at the portal - an angry pulsing circle, bright red, with two Hunters squeezing through side by side. But the portal’s real guardian had already crawled through.

Denise yelled, “Enforcer!” and I saw a hulking orange giant, eight feet tall, charging at us from behind.

I didn’t have time to think. I got a running start and leaped at it, like I was about to tackle something that outweighed me by three-hundred pounds. I looked like a child, jumping up to hug a long-lost relative at the airport. I landed on his face and was overwhelmed by the stench of him, the coppery-ozone scent of a summoned creature, mixed with sulfur and rotten meat.

He was trying to throw me off, but I just grabbed an ear with my left hand and started punching frantically with my right. I rode that big bastard to the ground and kept punching until his body vanished in a cloud of orange sparks.

Denise finished off the Hunters and ran in behind me, using some kind of faerie magic to close the portal. I relaxed as the red circle winked out, but Denise saw my shoulders go slack and snapped her fingers in front of my face. “Wake up! This shit is not over! You got bullets left?”

I nodded.

“Walk around outside and put a bullet in the head of anything that still has a physical body. Demons regenerate, so this is not over until every one of those bodies has vanished! I’ll get the interior!”

There were a couple Hunters left on the ground, snapping at me with broken teeth, trying to crawl forward on broken legs. I splattered their heads with ten-millimeter bullets until I heard Denise yell, “Clear!” and saw her emerge from the building.

I paced around nervously outside and finally said, “Clear?”

“Clear,” Denise agreed. “Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Raise your arms and turn around. You can’t always tell when you’ve been hit.”

I raised my arms and did a slow pirouette while Denise examined me. She leaned in close, pulled my arms down and said, “They didn’t even get your clothes dirty,” with a soft note of awe in her voice.

* * *

Azael is lecturing me with parables about pride as I watch this fight in the mirror, but he doesn’t get it.

This fight was all about Denise, about the incredible courage and confidence that swept over me every time we were together. It’s insane to watch myself breeze through this battle, calm and fearless, without one moment of doubt or flicker in concentration, fighting at a level of skill it would have taken me years to achieve on my own, remembering the feeling that I could do anything, as long as she was with me.

* * *

“Hey!” I said brightly. “I think I just had my first real hero fight!”

Denise threw her arms around me. “Tim, you just won your first real hero fight.”

I deflated, feeling suddenly guilty. “These things attacked you because of me. I’m—”

Denise put her finger to my lips. “Stop. Never apologize for winning. Any other girl in the world, you get her attacked by demons, you run in, you save her, you apologize. But me? I’ve been doing this since I was ten years old. Attacked by demons? That’s just Thursday.” Denise snuggled closer and ran fingers through my hair. “When you fight with me, you only apologize if we lose.”

And then she kissed me for a while.

* * *

“Was it like this in all those books, fighting with your mom?”

“Fighting with my mom?” Denise snorted. “My mom is an academic who used getting rescued as a dating strategy. I’ve been saving her fat ass since I was in pigtails.”

Denise squinted, and I realized she was looking at my aura. “So, this big purple rope you’re tethered to, that’s what sent these?”

“Yeah. A demon prince named… doesn’t matter. He’s had the mages of my family in a blood contract since the Middle Ages. I’m number eight.”

“And this little gold one?”

“That’s his succubus, Lydia.”

“Wait, is that the girlfriend you were talking about? You gave consent and went all the way with your succubus?”

I winced. “Pretty much, yeah.”

“Well, that was dumb.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Denise grinned. “So, how did she get you? Did she turn into your hot science teacher and make her tongue three feet long?”

“She put on blue jeans and made me dinner.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, shit. So, this wasn’t just a drive-by. She got in your head. How long did you hold out?”

“Why does everybody keep asking me that? Am I on a succubus leaderboard somewhere? About six weeks.”

“She did a full mind fuck on you, and you held out six weeks? That’s pretty good.”

“You don’t have to make me feel better. I know I fucked up.”

“Maybe I’m in a forgiving mood because I just made a big mistake of my own.”

“The billionaire guy?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing complicated,” she said. “He just lied. For weeks he was like, ‘Take a look at this presentation. I’ll fly you and your mom out to Africa!’”

“Then he started flirting, and after I slept with him, that changed to, ‘Oh sure, I’ll call you about that in a couple weeks, if we can get funding…’

“After he left, I finally did the searches I should have done the first time and found a dozen girls he’s done this to. Mitch was a sad little nerd for twenty years, and now that he’s rich, he wants to take revenge on every kind of woman who rejected him. He’s working his way through some kind of sexual bucket list, and I just helped him check off ‘witch.’”

She squinted at my aura again. “What’s this big red one? Not alive, but not just an object?”

“That’s the book. Kind of a magic encyclopedia that we inherit. I probably shouldn’t talk about it.”

“There’s a bunch of other tethers here, but they’re all gray. Dead connections.”

“Probably my ancestors, connected through the book.”

“And your succubus girlfriend, where is she now?”

“I sent her back to Hell.”

“Demons do not just go back to Hell. What did you do?”

“The lock of hair, deep sleep thing didn’t work, so I had to shoot her.”

“You shot a succubus with a gun? Did that even work?”

“Oh yeah.”

* * *

Denise tiptoed around it for a while, before asking the question every modern girl wants to know. “How did your demon get all these men to fall in love with her? What’s her superpower?”

“Monogamy.”

* * *

“So, her Master, this big purple thing. You’re really gonna fight this guy?”

“Yeah, I really do have a plan. It’s complicated… maybe too complicated, but I’ve invented some stuff, tricks and learning tools that nobody has tried before. If they work, I really can take him. But even if they don’t work, I can’t run from this. If the plans don’t work and the tricks don’t work, I’m just gonna wade in there and beat his ass, until one of us falls down.”

“Where do you need me?”

“You can’t help me with this.”

Denise was clearly offended. “You think I can’t handle it, after what we just did?”

I shook my head. “No, that’s not it.” I squeezed her hand. “I’m pretty sure I could do anything if you were with me, but you know why you can’t. I just learned about this stuff, and even I know why you can’t. Your family’s power isn’t just the magic inside you, right? It’s the connections. The generational agreements and alliances with faeries and stuff?”

She nodded.

“And those agreements are defensive, right?”

She nodded again.

“Well, what I’m doing is not defense. He has a valid contract and I declared war. I’m attacking them. And to finish it, I may have to take this fight all the way down. What happens to your mother’s agreements if they catch her daughter starting a war in Hell?”

Denise said nothing.

“Right. If somebody attacks the potion shop, an entire army of shit will come to defend you, but if you pick a fight with Hell, you’re on your own, and so is your mom. I won’t let you do that.”

Denise frowned. “There’s got to be some way I can help you. I’ll think about it.”

“Oh,” she said, suddenly remembering something. “I got a weird flash from the knife right before you called. Did you really stab a demon in the dick?”

* * *

We didn’t want to leave each other, but Denise had her mom blowing up her phone, and I had to check on Veazey.

We had one last sweaty, overcharged kiss and went our separate ways, promising to check in regularly until I started the fight for real.

Denise went back to the potion shop and Cecilia Hardy grabbed her daughter in a fierce hug, as soon as she came through the door. “What happened?”

Denise scowled at her. “I just killed forty demons with Timothy Kovak. That boy you threatened to kill last week is about to go toe to toe with a demon prince, and he’s gonna win.”

* * *

I would have done almost anything to avoid what I had to do next. I was expecting to find a hundred texts from Veazey when I finally turned my phone back on, but there was only one: “What happened?”

I called him and laid it out as simply as I could. “Your truck got caught in a demon fight, but the demon didn’t destroy it. I destroyed it, when I lost my shit after the fight. I tried to use magic to put it back together, but I can only restore the body. Repair magic can’t handle anything under the surface. I’m so sorry, man. I swear, if I win, if I become some rich wizard asshole, I will buy you a hundred trucks to replace it. I’ll hire a full restoration team to make it just like new. I swear I’ll make this right, somehow.”

But Veazey surprised me again. “It’s just a truck, man.”