CHAPTER XIX

Warmth.

A warmth like sunshine that evaporates spring leaves still wet with morning dew. Like soup on a cold day. Sleeping under warm blankets during a winter storm. A steamy shower on sore muscles. The soft embrace of a loved one.

He hadn’t felt warmth like this in a long, long time.

Blood.

There was blood in his mouth. It wasn’t his. It wasn’t Jude’s, either, or even Rollo’s. It was sunshine and joy and love and ecstasy all at once, a compound of dizzying sensations.

‘You’re not going to die here…!’

Morgan knew it then. It was the corporal’s blood flowing down his throat. This aroma was hers, these sensations were from her. He wanted more of it. He wanted –

He started to thrash. Snapped his mouth shut, ground his fangs together. Shalia, impossibly, held him down tighter. Her fingers found his jaw and prised his mouth apart with a strength he didn’t know she possessed.

‘You w-won’t kill me,’ she said, infuriatingly calm, as she held his mouth open. More liquid sunshine somehow found its way on his tongue. ‘Not like her. You can control yourself. You are in control of yourself. You hear me, lieutenant?’

He didn’t feel very in control of himself. He stopped thrashing, let the blood slide down his throat, but his instincts screamed for him to tackle and bite and tear.

A muffled scream of frustration. Rollo’s voice, from his demonic form; the bass shook the ground. Morgan didn’t open his eyes. Just a moment, one moment more…

Shalia was on the ground beneath him. He’d tackled her there but had no recollection of it.

‘You won’t hurt me,’ she said. Utterly confident.

He came very close. His fangs were inches from her neck before he wrestled control of himself; it was like moving a mountain, the effort to seize control of his limbs, throttle screaming instincts into submission. Morgan opened his eyes.

‘Are you insane?’ he said to her beneath him.

There was a gaping slash against Shalia’s neck, spewing red blood that sparked as it caught the moonlight. She’d made it herself somehow; Morgan didn’t want to consider what she had done to make a wound like that. Her amber eyes were cool and calm, but her breathing was shallow and sweat covered her in a sheen.

‘It’s my duty to protect my superior officer,’ she said.

‘And I’m ordering you not to do stupid, risky shit like that in the future. But,’ he bit into his lip and coaxed the blood to flow with his saliva, ‘thank you.’

Shalia went very still when he leaned into her neck, and shivered when he ran his tongue, laced with his own blood, over the wound. The flesh knitted together, leaving behind mossy, unblemished skin. When he inspected himself, the hole in his torso was gone, the skin an angry red. He got to his feet and pulled the corporal, still a little shaky, after him.

Morgan studied the area. ‘What the hell is that…?’

Rollo – in his demonic form – lay trapped between two violet magic circles, one above and one at his feet. Descending from the circle floating in the sky was a pair of furred, clawed hands of titanic proportions, so large they could encircle the demon Rollo and trap him quite secularly between its black talons. From the trap at Rollo’s feet was another pair of furred paws locked around Rollo’s powerful legs, keeping him in place. One furred index finger draped Rollo’s jaw, stopping those jagged teeth from snapping and taking a piece of the huge thing keeping him prisoner.

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Rollo strained against the beast, muscles bunching and veins standing out thickly from leathery red skin. He might as well have been fighting against the wind.

‘We needed a way,’ said Shalia, ‘to keep Wrath immobilised while I heal you – or if that failed, a way to escape. The exorcist – Jude, said he had a way, but…’ She pointed to the left of the spectacle before them, to where Jude kneeled in the centre of a magic circle of his own.

His head was thrown back, the whites of his eyes visible, mouth agape in a silent scream. Every tendon on his neck stood taut, every muscle trembled with strain; sweat glistened on every surface of exposed skin. Blood, inky and blue, flowed from his nose, eyes and ears.

Shalia continued, ‘He said that it won’t be easy.’

‘Won’t be easy.’

This was death; Morgan could smell it on the air. Death had a particular odour, something sad, desperate and innately wrong and achingly sweet, and right now that smell was hard to miss.

Jude was dying.

The cost to create or conjure the thing that trapped Rollo was killing him. The exorcist had the ability to come back, but would a spell like this stop at burning through one life? What if it required more? What if –

‘And you let him.’

‘Sir?’

‘You just let him go through with this.’

Uncomfortable now, ‘You’d be dead if he didn’t –’

‘You should’ve let him kill me!’ Morgan broke into run. Maybe if he dragged Jude out of the circle –

A current of white-hot pain erupted across his skin, radiating from the centre of his back. He stumbled and skidded across the stone, momentum carrying him for several more feet. He looked back over his shoulder and saw Shalia, the barrel of her Austere glowing faintly red from use.

The barrel still trained on him, she said, ‘Don’t let Jude’s sacrifice be in vain, lieutenant.’

Morgan looked back at Jude, frozen in pain. He glanced at Rollo, still trapped in the magic circle. Then back at the corporal.

‘Even,’ he said, getting shakily to his feet, ‘if it means I’ll have to kill Wrath?’

‘Even then. It’s beyond Jude’s powers to exorcise this man, and…’

‘And?’

‘If we let him go, who knows how many more he’ll kill? We might not get a next time.’

Morgan took a step toward Rollo and the thing keeping him prisoner. Easier said than done; how can he be killed? If Jude’s creature could just smash him flat that would save everyone the trouble –

Sweetheart.

Morgan started. That was –

Yes, I’ve opened up but I don’t have long.

The exorcist was wasting too much time. How many lives could he have burned through already, just to share this message?

That’s – just the one, Morgan. Just one, but the next won’t be far off, I’m afraid. Not unless you kill Wrath first.

But if they couldn’t exorcise it, what could be done?

I forget sometimes. You’re still so young – both you, and her. Shalia can drain life energy as well as give it – yes, I know it’s not effective. But aren’t you forgetting something?

Morgan ran through the evening quickly in his mind, going through every potential weakness or a chink in Rollo’s defence. He found nothing useful.

You’ll need to go at him both at once, the corporal draining his energy and you…

‘I don’t get what you mean!’ screamed Morgan in frustration.

I…I can’t, Shalia –

Jude’s voice cut off. The blood poured from his nose and eyes in earnest; the exorcist’s heart was hammering in his chest, stuttering as it tried to keep up with the life that was consuming it.

Morgan ran his hands through his shaggy hair in frustration.

‘Lieutenant, calm down.’ Shalia joined him. ‘Think it through clearly. You were talking to Jude, right? What did he say?’

‘He said you can drain his energy, and I – I dunno’, I have to – fuck!’

He wasn’t expecting her eyes to light up.

‘Oh.’ She holstered her Austere.

Desperately he growled, ‘What?’

‘Oh, we’ve been so stupid.’ She advanced on Rollo, her steps confident, determined. She loosened her tie and undid the buttons on her shirt. Freed the wings trapped against her back – one buckle, then two.

‘Corporal?’

From Shalia’s back unfurled a pair of enchanting, glassy lime-green wings shot through with violet, a pulse of light running from shoulder to the wingtip. She stepped inside the circle at Rollo’s feet. The magic made no move to stop her. She placed a hand on the only easily accessible place on Rollo’s body not obscured by furred fingers: his abdomen. Her wings quivered, poised for escape. Rollo towered above her; she looked so small standing there. ‘We need to drain the magic – the demonic presence – from his body. Completely. If we’re very careful, we might even be able to extract the demon without killing the host.’

‘We?’

She rolled her eyes and placed her other hand on Rollo’s torso. Golden light spread beneath her fingers, travelling up her arm and through the length of those butterfly-like wings. She winced as Rollo began to thrash.

‘Lieutenant,’ she said, ‘did you forget? You’re not human.’