Hexed_ The Iron Druid Chronicles - Kevin Hearne [110]
“Shadowy figures,” the Morrigan had said. I’d do battle with shadowy figures. Well, one of the figures wasn’t human; it had a distinctly demonic aura. I realized that, where they were located, they probably would have had shelter from both the RPGs we launched and a very good chance of taking cover from the grenades I’d tossed if they heard them clatter on the floor. I crouched low, took a deep breath, and kept Fragarach in front of me as I stepped into the gunk, depending on Leif to follow.
There were broken, bloody bodies on the floor, withered arms and knobby knees twisted unnaturally; all their glamour was gone in death. I would count them later. There were ten figures ahead that I could see, grouped in a loose circle, some of them seated on the floor chanting something in low tones, and nearly all of them showing the telltale signs of hell. As soon as I processed that, it set me to sprinting: The seated ones were in the midst of a ritual and the others were guarding them, because they were close to completing it. I had no idea who their target was, but I didn’t want anyone on our side to die because I exercised undue caution.
I hurriedly cast camouflage on myself, remembering that they hadn’t been able to see through it during the war. After that, my thinking self practically disappeared and I became an extension of my endocrine system.
One of the standing figures—a female silhouette—had an automatic weapon of some sort and heard me coming across the rubble. She sprayed a dozen rounds or so in my general direction; I saw the muzzle flashes at the same time that the slugs knocked me back on my ass, gasping for breath and counting my lucky stars that my neighbor was an arms dealer. She saw Leif coming next and turned the gun on him, but bullets bothered him about as much as bee stings, and many of them pinged off his steel breastplate anyway. I’d let him worry about the guards; it was the seated figures in the ritual that had to die right now.
I got up on my knees, gripped Fragarach’s hilt in both hands, raised it over my head, then threw it at the nearest skull in sight. It flew true, crunching messily through the back of the head and out the witch’s mouth before the guard halted its progress through her pate. Leif decapitated the machine gunner almost simultaneously and was amputating another guardian’s arm at the elbow when a small piece of hell busted loose.
Halting a demonic ritual in progress is usually disastrous for those involved, and so it was for the hexen. Instead of completing the hex intended for Malina or some other Sister of the Three Auroras, the two remaining witches—one of them on her back with her legs spread wide—were instantly immolated in the consuming flames they’d been trying to summon. Out of those flames rose a very large demon ram, bigger than those we’d seen on the second floor. It was laughing heartily, because we’d caught him in flagrante delicto and the death of the witches had unbound him, setting him free on this plane. Everyone, including Leif, stopped what they were doing to see what he would do. The ram regarded us evenly for a moment—he wasn’t fooled by my camouflage—and decided he had no desire to take us on; there was so much more fun to be had elsewhere, with people who couldn’t fight him. He turned his head north and lowered it as he charged, punching yet another hole in the glass wall and plunging into the street below, extending his hooves as he fell to absorb the shock in his powerful haunches.
Such an escape attempt was precisely what the Polish coven was waiting for. I scrambled to the edge to look below; Malina had stationed herself at the northwest corner, and though she had seen that Bogumila was under assault at the northeast corner, she hadn’t abandoned her post, lest something like the ram get away.
She attacked it fiercely, and all the faster so that she could run to help Bogumila. She shouted something indistinct in Polish, shot her empty right