Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(67)

Burning eyes, multifaceted.

Demon.

He’d fought them before. Most had no opacity or smell, no internal organs, because these were irrelevant to the purpose for which they were summoned. They had claws and teeth, because these were not.

Crystal wings buzzed as the demon darted toward him. He dodged up and back and caught the creature as it passed through the space he had occupied a second before. It was fast, almost as fast as Shale. Hooked legs jabbed toward his face, but he brushed them aside, wrapped them beneath his arm. Claws raked his stomach. He blocked one; the other burrowed into him. They fell onto an elevated train track, crashed apart.

Shale leapt from the track as a train charged past. The demon blurred up from the ground. He folded his wings and dove to meet it.

He struck the demon with his full weight—and then the demon struck pavement with Shale on top, and shattered.

He crouched in the street, wreathed in demonsmoke. Horses reared. Carriage wheels clattered on cobblestones. Human shapes approached from the sidewalk. A girl held out her arm. She recoiled when he turned to her. Out here, in the light, he felt exposed.

He flew.

When he crested the skyscrapers, two more demons hit him at once.

*

Abelard felt glass knives carve his city’s sky. He saw them through the eyes of a frightened boy on a fire escape, of an old man watching the few visible stars through a telescope, of a girl singing on a rooftop in the Paupers’ Quarter.

God’s knowledge washed against his own like waves at an island’s shore, leaving traces of itself. Demons in the city but not of it—demons marked as Seril’s people.

They flew toward the gargoyles’ tower. Through an accountant working late Abelard saw two catch Shale in midair, whiplike limbs seizing his arms, proboscises jabbing. They drank from him.

On the northeastern tower, the moon began to set.

Then, a silver streak—

*

Cat saw Shale tumbling, held aloft by two sets of demon wings. She heard his cry through the Suit; without the Suit she would have only felt it in her bones. We need to help him, she said.

“You can’t fight them and carry me,” Raz said.

I’ll set you down—

“Throw me.”

Are you crazy?

Shale’s roar weakened as they drained him.

“Do it.”

She gathered him in her arms, let the Suit judge trajectory, and threw. He was a missile of cloth and muscle and teeth.

He landed on a demon’s back, and as she closed the gap she saw him wrap his legs around its abdomen, grab its bulbous head and pull, back and up. A proboscis sprang free of Shale’s back, spun around, split into snapping jaws, but too late. Raz snapped the head free of the body.

And fell, as the demon disintegrated beneath him.

Godsdammit she didn’t have time—the fall, the Suit offered, would take thirty seconds—she tore two legs off Shale’s remaining demon. Claws caught at her but Shale’d regained enough strength to help. She speared the demon through the heart with its own leg. Its carapace cracked, and twenty seconds, she planted her legs on Shale’s body and dove down from him, fifteen, ten, flare— She caught Raz thirty feet from the pavement, turned his plummet to a sideways swoop, then soared.

He was, she noticed, still grinning.

They met Shale in the air. Silver light leaked from cracks in his skin. He pressed one hand to his side, and more light trickled through his fingers.

Can you fly?

“I must.”

He pointed to the tower in the Ash atop which Cat had seen the second moon.

It was setting now, and glass bugs buzzed around it.

*

Panic of order time breaks the.

Tara, in some sequence:

—hutched under skittering claws as a spear mouth jabbed at her face— —threw herself to rough stone and raised her hands and a shield of Craft— —turned from the goddess’s throne to see crystal rainbows and claws approaching and— —saw gargoyles tense and throne light flicker, Seril lose coherence as Jones dropped to one knee— To the nine hells with order anyway. Fight.

She stabbed through her shield into demon-skin. The crystal reflected her knife, but the demon recoiled anyway, allowing Tara space to rise, cloaked in shadow.

Demons swarmed Seril’s children. Gar went down beneath the weight of two; he clutched one to his chest, shattering it, but the other stabbed him with its mouth and drank. Aev fought three at once, battered a fourth with her wings. Their chorus had broken into roars and rage. Tara closed her eyes, saw their Craft.

She shuddered.

Demons (Professor Halcyon had said, pacing before class with pointer tapping against her palm) hail from continuity neighboring our own, and as a result when brought into our realm possess whatever properties they have been assigned by negotiation. Unbound, they’re undefined—conscious singularities that warp the world until the pressure of paradox grows too great and they collapse, destroying territory they’ve tainted in the process. And that, class, is why we triple-check our summoning contracts.

The contract at these demons’ core was dreadfully simple. A few provisions listed the steps by which they might be slain: basic stuff, pressure tolerances, resistances, immunities. They could absorb others’ soulstuff. And they were bound to obey the holder of an indenture canceled by … Tara herself.

Oh, gods.