Time - Chapter 22
The address Lilith gave us led to a meat packing plant in the heart of Prague.
This is a portal fantasy series with mythological roots and action-adventure tendencies. You can search through all my work on my website.
In the ashes of her past, she will rise up, and her death will save us all.
Lizzie ran from her past for ten years, zigzagging across the United States every few months, trying to outlast the prophesy that an oracle gave to her when she was just sixteen years old.
But nobody can run from their destiny forever.
After watching her friend brutally gunned down by a group of ruthless demons, she had no choice but to protect the woman’s child, and there was only one place where Lizzie knew the girl would be safe.
Bronard, Missouri.
Home.
She stayed away to protect her parents, but the girl needed mystical protection.
Her parents had taken in magical strays their whole lives, including Lizzie. If anyone could save the poor child’s life, it would be her mother and father.
But will returning to her home doom Lizzie even as she works to save the child she has vowed to defend?
The address Lilith gave us led to a meat packing plant in the heart of Prague. Demons didn’t like the daylight and tended to hop around the world following the night across the time zones. Kimberly told me that when I was young—probably to convince me not to go out at night, but that didn’t make it any less true. Even fairy tales held a grain of truth, after all. Kimberly didn’t know Prague very well, so the closest she could get us was the Sedlec Ossuary, a church decorated in bone, an hour outside of the city.
“Why couldn’t you get us closer?” I growled as the cab driver turned off the highway into the city proper.
“I have to remember a place perfectly to teleport to it, or I’ll get lost in the void. Is that what you want, to be lost in the void forever?”
“No,” I said, though I wasn’t sure of my answer. The last time I was knocked unconscious, I felt a comfort in the darkness; it wrapped me like a comfortable blanket. “Of course not.”
It had been three hours since the girl had been kidnapped, and my heart raced as the cab made its way into the city. When the driver finally let us out in front of the brick warehouses, there was an air of confusion about him. I doubted that many tourists made a habit of seeing nondescript buildings outside of the city center.
“You stay here,” Kimberly said to me. “I’m going to scout the perimeter.”
Before I could protest, her wings glowed on her back, and she flew up into the air, landing on the edge of a nearby roof. She glanced back at us before she disappeared from view.
“I don’t like waiting,” Zachary said.
I pulled my coat tighter around my chest. “Me either. I’m amped up now and ready to fight. Every minute we stay here is a minute that we risk them killing the girl.”
“I am so angry I could take down a hundred demons with my bare hands.” He pressed his fists together. “Plus, it’s frigging freezing out here, and that’s not helping my mood.”
He was right. It was absolutely frigid, even in my coat, and by the time we had waited for ten minutes, Zachary’s nose was red, and his teeth chattered loudly. I was just about to give up and find shelter when Kimberly appeared above us and she floated down to the ground.
“They’re inside. They have Veronica tied up on a conveyor belt. There is no good way to save her without causing a scene.”
“So what? We just go in, guns blazing?”
She nodded. “Seems like it. There’s a skylight above the building. I think we smash through it, Batman-style, and use the element of surprise to snatch her up and escape before they get wise.”
Zachary smiled. “That sounds good to me, except I’m not leaving until I send at least a couple of those assholes back down to Hell.”
“Then you can be the muscle. Go in first, and the two of us will use the distraction.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said.
“Then grab on.”
Zachary and I latched onto Kimberly’s shoulders, and she flew us up to the roof. It wasn’t graceful—she clearly wasn’t used to carrying so much weight with her. As we made our way across the roofs, dead demons lined our path, victims of Kimberly’s stealthy attacks.
Two more demons laid dead on the roof of the meat packing plant where they held Veronica, making six bodies, but there must have been three dozen more below us. As I peered through the skylight, the demons parted, revealing Veronica bound to the end of a long conveyor belt. On the other end was a collection of mechanical saws, still bloody from cutting through bone and viscera.
“They’re going to chop her up,” I said. “That’s disgusting.”
“They want to be sure nothing or nobody can bring her back together again,” Kimberly replied. “They must be very afraid of this girl.”
“Enough talk,” Zachary said. “Are we doing this or not?”
“We’re doing this,” Kimberly said. “It’s a very, very stupid thing, but we’re doing it.”
Zachary howled as he transformed into a werewolf under the light of the moon. When the transformation was complete, he leaped into the air and crashed through the skylight, sending broken shards of glass raining onto the floor below and drawing the attention of the guards.
“Ready to kick some ass?” Kimberly asked me.
“Oh, hell yeah.”
She pulled out a switchblade from her boot and passed it to me. “In case you get to her before me.”
She grabbed my hand, and we leaped through the skylight as demon guts and green blood flew across the room from the carnage Zachary wrought among the demons.
“Crepitus glacies!” I screamed, releasing a ball of light from my fists, opening my palm. I watched it explode on the demons below us. “Grandinis!”
As we landed, a hailstorm grew above us, showering hail on the waiting demons. They stumbled backward. Kimberly didn’t wait to attack once she landed. She moved forward like lightning, stabbing and slicing one demon after another.
“Get the girl!” she shouted.
The demons must have heard her because the conveyor belt whizzed to life, and Veronica let out a scream as she started moving toward the rotating buzzsaw.
“Glacies spica!” I screamed at one of the demons guarding the conveyor belt, and it fell, bleeding a thick green ooze from the ice spike embedded in its forehead. “I’m coming, Veronica!”
An orange-tinged demon swung a scimitar at me, and I dropped to my knees to avoid it. However, I realized too late that it wasn’t slicing toward me, but Kimberly. I heard a scream and turned back to see Kimberly falter, a gash across her back. I went to help, but before I could muster a spell, she turned and drilled a dagger into the demon’s eye.
“Go!” she screamed, though her voice was less steady than before. She leapt into the air as two demons made their way toward her, and she kicked the demon she’d just killed.
“Glacies spica!” I shouted again to the demon at the controls. The spike fired, but the demon was too fast. It dodged my attack, and the spike went into the controls for the machine, causing it to fritz out of control and speed up the belt. Veronica careened even faster to her gruesome end.
“NO!” I screamed. There was no way to turn off the controls in time, so I rushed toward her. A demon came after me, but Zachary hurtled a mangled demon toward it, and both of their bodies crashed into the belt.
“Thank you!” I shouted.
I sent an ice spike into another demon before I reached Veronica. I pulled out the switchblade and cut her free from her thick ropes as she looked at me with wild, scared eyes.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said as I frayed the rope. We were getting precariously close to the spinning blades, but finally, I cut her free and pulled her from the conveyor belt, wrapping her in a hug as we cried in each other’s arms.
“I knew you would come for me,” she said, grabbing me tightly.
“I always will,” I replied. “Now, let’s get you home, okay?”
“Yes, please.”
I pulled her into my arms and rushed toward the door. “Let’s get out of here!”
“Go!” Kimberly shouted.
“We’ll be right behind you,” Zachary growled, ripping a demon in half.
Zachary and Kimberly were still engaged with demons, so I needed to take charge and bring Veronica to freedom. I dodged a razor-sharp demon’s claws and spun away from another before I had a clear shot at the door.
It was right there, and my steps grew faster as I neared it, ready to—
—I let out a gasp as a sharp pain shot through me. I looked down to see a thick metal rod had pierced through my chest and straight into Veronica’s neck. Blood oozed onto my chest as the life left her eyes.
“No, no, no, no, no. Please don—”
That was all I had the energy to say as the last of my breath left my body, and I fell down, dead.
This is a portal fantasy series with mythological roots and action-adventure tendencies. You can search through all my work on my website.