No time to worry about my uncle. Artery is only seconds behind his master. Races at me on his tiny feet, flames in his eyes bright and vicious again, the teeth in his three mouths gnashing menacingly.
I wait until Artery’s upon me, then drop to one knee and shoot a hand out. I grab his throat. Squeeze the cartilage hard. Crush it. Toss him aside. Choked gurgling sounds. Artery brings up his hands to repair the damage. I step towards him, set on finishing him off. Before I can, another demon bursts on to the scene. It’s shaped like a monkey with several heads and has been chasing humans out from town. When it sees the hole in the barrier and spots me battling with Artery, it comes barrelling at me.
I glimpse claws and fangs. Whirl away. A blast of magic hits my left shoulder. My arm goes numb. When I look down, I realise it’s been cut clean off. It lies on the ground nearby, singed and twisted.
“Grubbs!” Bill-E screams as the monkey demon closes in for the kill.
“Stay where you are!” I yell, kicking the demon away, magically stopping the blood pumping from the gash where my arm should be. I bark a command and the earth at the demon’s feet explodes, throwing it backwards. While it’s recovering, I grab my arm and stick it back in place, blasting magic at it. Severe pain as flesh, muscles and bone knot together, but I use more magic to dull it.
I’m able to do so much more than when I first fought Lord Loss’ familiars. It’s frightening. I’m not in control of myself, just reacting, doing things without knowing how. The magic part of me isn’t even giving me instructions now. It’s bypassing the conscious part of my brain, working by itself.
More of the cast and crew stumble through the hole. Several of the demons in pursuit try to tear through after them. I scatter the monsters, then quickly establish a second barrier around the hole, which allows humans through but not demons.
A heavy thudding sound. Dervish and Lord Loss have crashed to earth. Still struggling with each other, both wounded and bruised, roaring spells and curses.
The familiars make a coordinated attack, ganging up on me. They close from all angles, encircling me. I try backing up to the wall of the barrier, to guard myself from sneak attacks, but a few have already got in behind me. Artery—neck fixed and hot for revenge—snickers. I sense the confidence of the demons. They have me trapped. My situation should be hopeless. But the magic part of me only sees this as a way to deal with them all at the same time.
I find myself rising into the air, then turning, slowly at first, then at great speed, 360 degree spins, around and around, creating a vortex. The demons are sucked towards me, collide and are thrown clear. I’m not injured by the collisions—my skin has automatically toughened.
A couple of demons try to fight the bite of the wind and drag me down, but all are repelled. Eventually they quit and return to harassing and killing other humans. I drift back to the ground. Slightly dizzy but otherwise fine, I do what I can to protect the fleeing crowd, trying to shepherd through as many as I can.
There aren’t many coming now. The stream has died away to a trickle. No sign of Bo returning. I wonder how long we have left, if she’ll have time to make it back. As if in answer, Dervish bellows, “We have to get out! It’s going to close!”
“You’ll never leave!” Lord Loss screams, digging a couple of hands deep into Dervish’s flesh. The snakes in the demon master’s chest are spitting at Dervish’s face, trying to bite him.
“Go!” Dervish shouts. “Save yourself!”
“As if!” I snort, eyeing up Lord Loss. I focus on his lumpy, writhing arms. With a cruel smile, I gnash my teeth together—and all eight of his limbs are abruptly severed. Stunned, he topples backwards, yelping with pain and shock, his disconnected limbs flopping to the ground.
Dervish crumples up into a weary ball. I hurry to my uncle, grab him and toss him through the hole in the barrier as if he was a frisbee, using magic to soften his fall. A quick glance at Lord Loss. I can’t resist the opportunity to toss a final movie-style quip his way. “Some people say you’re a bad-ass—but I think you’re pretty ’armless!” Then I skip out before he recovers and rips me to pieces.
BITTER SWEET
I feel the difference as soon as I step through the hole. Magic drains away from me instantly. Tiredness sets in. My left arm and shoulder ache like no pain I’ve experienced before. But I’m not completely powerless, not yet. I face the gap in the barrier, summon the final dregs of my magic and prepare myself to fight any demon that tries to follow us through.
Dervish groans and forces himself up, helped by a trembling Bill-E. One of Lord Loss’ hands is embedded in the flesh of his stomach. He prises it out and tosses it away. It twitches for a few seconds, then disintegrates into an ash-like substance.
I see humans running towards the barrier. “Faster!” I scream. “You don’t have much longer! You’ve got to—”
Lord Loss glides across the face of the hole, blocking my view. His face is a mask of hatred and fury. Snarling, he starts to come through… then pauses, looks around and drifts backwards.
“He doesn’t dare cross,” Dervish mutters. “His magic would fail him out here. He’d have to fight on our terms.”
“You will suffer for this,” the demon master snarls. “Your deaths would have been horrible, but now they’ll be far worse. I will find new ways to—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bill-E says, stepping up beside us. “Go blow it out your rear, you pathetic waste of space.”
Lord Loss hisses and starts to spit out a spell. Before he completes it, there’s a sharp cracking sound and the hole in the barrier seals itself. Lord Loss looks up and down, in case there’s any crack remaining, but it’s been completely repaired.
“I will answer your insults later,” he vows, new arms forming from all eight stumps. “You will die at these hands eventually. Only now it will be much slower and far more excruciating than I had originally planned.”
Glancing backwards, the demon master flexes his fresh fingers and points at the people still fleeing Slawter, those trapped within the bubble of magic. “Your day of reckoning will arrive sooner than you imagine, Grady scum. For now, watch as I content myself with this sorry lot and consider it a taste of the horrors to come.”
Having delivered his threat in a manner any movie demon would be proud of, the eight-armed, heartless monster floats towards the doomed humans, warding off his familiars, saving these last few victims for his own warped pleasure.
“Look away,” Dervish says wearily to those of us on the safe side of the barrier. “This is going to be ugly. You don’t want to watch.”
“We have to get them out!” a woman wails. “My son’s still in there. You have to go—”
Dervish looks at her darkly. Puts a finger to his lips. She falls silent. Then my uncle turns his back on the town, sits on the ground, and very slowly and deliberately closes his eyes and places both hands over his ears—blocking out the sights and sounds of the inhuman, bloody slawter.
Dervish is right. It’s not something that should be seen. Yet I have to watch, at least for a while, as Lord Loss savages and slaughters one person after another, dragging them kicking and screaming up close to the barrier so we can see and hear more clearly. It’s dreadful, the ways he finds to torture and kill them. I want to reach through and stop him, but my powers are swiftly fading. Even if there was some way of breaking through the barrier, I no longer have the strength to harm him. I’d have to go back in, but that would be suicide.
Juni regains consciousness while Lord Loss is hard at work. Groans, sits up, looks around groggily, then leaps to her feet, eyes wide. “It’s OK,” I tell her. “We made it. They can’t—”