A Despair of Demons (Travelers, Book 1) (20 page)

They were too slow. Liv lifted her head to peer around the corner and saw
the demon standing straight and stiff. It was impossible to read its alien
expression but its posture certainly conveyed surprise. It stood that way for
less than half a second, then growled and ran toward them.

“Shit,” Connor breathed from his position at the warehouse doorway. Liv knew
that his brain, like hers, was scrambling through the possible scenarios: ambush,
gunfire, capture. Or avoidance. “Liv,” he whispered. “Here.”

Liv joined Connor at the doorway. “We only have eleven shots.”

The demon raced closer, almost at their position. She already had the brain
ray out and the lever switched to
belief
.

“Stop him,” Connor said.

Liv pointed the device at the demon rushing toward them and depressed the
trigger. She waited for the beep, and then in a quiet but carrying voice, she
said, “Stop.”

The demon froze, almost overbalancing in its sudden halt.

“Demon, you will not see us or hear us. Forget you heard anything and go
about your business.”

The demon jumped, looked around as if unsure how or why it had ended up
there, and turned back down the street. At the cross street where they had
first seen it, it looked around again, turned left, and disappeared.

Trent crossed the street to the warehouse, and nodded at Liv as he passed
through the door. “I’d prefer not to let them get that close again.”

“Agreed,” she said. She joined the others in a sweep of the building,
stowing the brain ray and pulling her sidearm to cover the area. She wished she
was ambidextrous like Jordan, but she’d never manage two guns at once.

The warehouse was just an empty metal building. The floor was packed crushed
stone that crunched with every movement.

“There’s a back door, Connor,” she called quietly.

He motioned Trent to follow him and the rest of them to stay put.

Trent opened the door, Connor went through, and Trent followed immediately. It
was a dance they had performed thousands of times.

Minutes later, they returned. As Connor came through the door, he said,
“Nothing out there either. If there’s another entrance to Woolfe’s building, we
didn’t find it. I hoped we’d have some kind of servant’s entrance or something,
but it looks like we’re going in the front door.”

“You couldn’t even peek in the windows?” Ben asked.

Trent shook his head. “You saw the building. There’s a stone block basement
that extends up past the ground floor. No windows.”

Connor scowled. “Even the periscope wouldn’t reach.”

The team regrouped around Connor. “Is there a reason to do this on another
day or do we go right now?”

He looked at Liv. “We’re already here, and we had to use one shot to do it. Ten
left. I’m sure we’ll need at least a few to get inside. I say go.”

Connor nodded and turned to Jordan. “There are far fewer demons outside than
I expected. Either there’s something else drawing them away and they’re not
here at all, which is good, or they’re expecting us and luring us in, which is
very bad.”

Connor waited, but when Jordan said nothing else, he asked, “So? Go or no
go?”

Jordan stood lost in thought. Finally, he said, “Go.”

Connor raised his eyebrows at Ben, who said, “Hoo-rah! Let’s bag us a bad
guy.”

Gin grinned back at him when his eyes fell on her. “Bring it.”

Trent was last. “I already stated my opinion. I don’t like it.”

“Is it worth the risk?” Connor asked.

“We’ll only get one shot at this. Even if we get caught and Travel out to
escape, we’ll never get a second chance to surprise them and get to the Wolf. What
if we’re seen leaving the city?”

“So go?”

“Yes.”

Having given them the final chance to raise objections, Connor became brisk.
“This will have to be quick. We need to get through the Wolf’s door without
anything else wandering by to raise the alarm. Jordan, you’re lock breaker. I’m
with you. Liv, you’re right behind us with the ray gun. Then Gin and Ben, Trent
rearguard.”

Liv holstered her sidearm and pulled the brain ray.

“Quietly,” Connor continued. “No guns unless we have absolutely no choice.
We don’t want to alert anything outside of the building. Move out.”

Liv followed Jordan and Connor as they stalked to the doorway. Connor held a
knife and a gun, but Jordan had holstered his guns and was pulling his lock
picks. Liv didn’t like to see him even momentarily unarmed. She told herself
that they wouldn’t need weapons at all with the brain ray, but she wasn’t
entirely convinced.

They made it to the door of the stone building without further demon
sightings. Connor stopped at the far side of the door and tried the latch. A
look of surprise crossed his face when it clicked and turned. Jordan fell back,
stowing his picks and pulling a gun. Liv moved forward. She changed places with
Jordan and signaled to Connor:
ready
.

Connor swung the door open and she swept through, brain ray leveled.

She entered a small marble foyer, more like an airlock with a space just
wide enough for the door to open, and an identical door at the far side, steps
away. Even closer than the door, however, stood a demon.

It was already leaping for the doorway when she registered its presence as
she came through, and she shot immediately with the brain ray. She scrambled
out of the way as Jordan and Connor came through. Jordan had both guns out now,
leveled on the demon.

“Jordan,” Connor warned.

They couldn’t shoot unless Liv was in mortal danger. She was starting to
wonder if she might be, as the demon refused to be distracted and chased her
around the tiny vestibule. She barely managed to stay ahead of the talons while
trying to keep the brain ray pointed in its direction, hoping not to affect
Connor or Jordan, who dodged under and behind the giant wings. After an
eternity, the brain ray beeped. “Stop!” she said quietly.

The demon obeyed. She said, “You will not see us, you will not hear us, and
you will not remember us.” The demon went back to its guard post by the inner
door.

“Clear,” Conner called quietly, and the rest of the team joined them.

“I’m sorry,” Ben said, “but I am just not getting used to how
awesome
that is!”

She returned his grin with a weak smile—the best she could muster
after nearly not out-dodging an eight-foot, one-ton monster with six-inch
claws.

Connor took up a post by the inner door and looked expectantly at Liv. She
took a deep breath and nodded, repeating the foyer entry.

This time, she entered a cavernous echoing room, as if they really had
entered the lair of a beast. The dim light made it hard to see details, but she
noted a stair to her left and a wide-open space to her right. She breathed a
sigh of relief when she also noted the absence of demons.

As her team filed in, Liv’s eyes adjusted well enough to see the windows a
story above them filtering in the dim yellow light. The wide-open space to her
right proved to be a mess hall extending into the gloom. A recognizable serving
area took up the far side of the room, and rows of cafeteria-style picnic
tables filled the floor. She imagined what would have happened if they had
arrived during lunch or dinner, shuddering at the thought of a hundred demons
rushing them as they came through the door.

“Up,” Connor said quietly, bringing her back to the mission.

Liv nodded. Woolfe would be at the top. They trooped up the stone staircase,
she and Jordan sharing a wincing glance at the noise the rest were making. She
wished they could clear the whole building, but she knew they didn’t have the
firepower. They’d just have to hope they weren’t flanked from behind.

They reached the third—top—floor within a minute. If they had to
Travel out now, there would be a problem. Three floors was too far to fall into
Safe World. They’d have to Travel there and back here, hit a lower floor, and then
get out again.

Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that.

At the door, Connor once again allowed her through first. This one was wood
instead of metal, making Liv fear that she would pass directly into Woolfe’s
chambers.

She went through fast, leading with the brain ray, but had to blink against
the bright light on the other side. Movement barely registered—something
big and red-purple—before she had discharged the ray gun.

A second movement to her left, heard and felt more than seen, had her
spinning away, holding the ray on the first demon.

“Hey!” someone said sharply behind her, and she knew Connor and the others
were distracting the second demon.

The brain ray finally beeped, and she said, “Stop!”

She didn’t wait to see the demon obey before she spun to discharge the gun
again. Luckily, she could aim above her teammates at the demon’s head, and they
dodged back as she held the gun on it.

When it beeped, she immediately repeated her command.

The two demons who had been guarding the doorway now stood like broken
windup toys in the hallway. She repeated her don’t-see, don’t-hear,
don’t-remember command, and finally got a chance to look around. She blinked to
make sure she wasn’t hallucinating.

It was as if she stood in a luxury hotel. Her boots sank into deep
burgundy-and-gold plush carpet, and the walls were papered in beige and gold
and lit by gold sconces. Dark mahogany trim lined the doorways and several
delicate settees upholstered in gold velvet sat along the walls.

She turned to the rest of her team. “Where are we?”

Ben glanced around. “Woolfe’s private floor.”

Jordan scowled at her. “I don’t like you going through the door alone. We
need to pair up from now on.”

Connor nodded his agreement and gestured to the right. “Down the hall. You
and Jordan can lead us.”

Liv set off up the corridor. Several doors opened off this corridor, and
another hallway crossed theirs about halfway up.

No sound came from behind any of the closed doors.

Liv wondered what could be behind them. Without warning, the door
immediately on their right opened. A human girl stepped through, giggling at
someone in the room, and only turned to the corridor after she’d shut the door.
Her eyes widened in shock when she saw the strangers, and she drew a startled
breath.

“No, it’s okay, we’re friends,” Jordan said, but she drew a bigger breath,
clearly intending to scream.

Liv shook her head, and shot her with the brain ray. Again, she repeated her
don’t-see, don’t-remember commands. This was getting old. And she was down to
six shots now.

“You didn’t have a choice,” Jordan said. “We couldn’t beat her unconscious.”

“So you were right,” Trent said. “There are humans in Hell.”

Jordan stared at her. “Great.”

“Yeah,” Gin said, disgust in her voice. “Harem girls.”

“Thought you’d be all over that, Virgin,” Ben said.

Gin gave him a glare so vicious he held up his hands in surrender, giving
her a wounded look. “Sorry.”

Gin simply turned back to the hallway.

Liv wondered why she was so angry, but there was no time now. They continued
along the sumptuous corridor, following a branch that went only to the right
this time.

They turned the corner and found a single door set at the end of the hall.
Standing in front of the door were eight demons, and behind them, just visible
between his bodyguards, stood Raul Woolfe.

Woolfe looked exactly like Liv remembered from his trial and execution, from
the sallow skin to the greasy dark hair to the skeletal build. She fought the
urge to cower as his flat dead eyes met hers and his lips curled in a cold
smile. When he had last turned that smile on her, he had been strapped to a
gurney while being prepped for lethal injection.

She remembered Jordan’s words:
this
Woolfe doesn’t know you from Eve.
It helped, especially when this time,
instead of picking her out of the crowd, the cold gray gaze passed over her
without pause.

The demons closed ranks, hiding Woolfe from view. Liv only had six shots,
and she needed at least one for him. The hopelessness of hitting all the demons
with the ray when she had to wait for it to read their brains first—in
the middle of a firefight, no less—was not lost on her. Still, they had
to try.

“We need at least three dead,” she murmured to Jordan, and shot the first
with the brain ray. She couldn’t even see the others behind the mass of demons
that filled the corridor as they lurched closer, closing in on Liv’s team.

It was too loud to hear the gun beep, but she saw the display change.

“Stop!” She shot the next in line while she repeated her now familiar
refrain. For a wonder, the first two demons she shot did stop, but they were
savagely shoved aside by the others. Apparently, there was no chance of hitting
multiple targets with one shot, because if she was ever going to have a more
crowded target area, she couldn’t imagine it.

The Wolf said from somewhere behind them, “Take them to the cell block.”

“Liv, shoot him!” Connor yelled from behind her.

“I can’t even see him!” she shouted back as she shot two more demons.

“Fall back!” Connor shouted. “Safe World, now!”

Liv tried to follow his direction, but it felt like Jordan’s description of
Elachai trapping him in Safe World: she couldn’t get through the door in her
mind marked ‘Travel.’

She had a moment of panic at the thought of getting left behind, but a quick
glance showed her teammates were having the same problem.

“Shit!” Trent threw one of his stars while the rest of the team reached for
their sidearms.

The five remaining demons moved so fast they were blurred—one of her
shots must have misfired.

Only two shots left, and she needed one for Woolfe. But as a demon lunged
for her, she saw another lunging for Jordan, talons bare and lethal. Immediately,
she shot it. “Stop!” she shouted, and it did. Jordan shot the one coming at her
with his sidearm, and it whirled back on him.

“No!” Liv lurched forward, trying to get to Jordan, but the demon had
already scooped him up in a taloned hand.

Behind it came eight more. There must have been others in the room at the
end of the hallway.

She stowed the brain ray with its one remaining shot and pulled her sidearm,
but a demon snatched her with razor-tipped talons, hoisting her off the ground.
She hung like a rag doll in its grip.

She shot the one that reached for Jordan, saw holes open in its hide and
blood flow. As in Blue Beach, the bullets had no other effect.

Gin stabbed the demon that snatched her up. She buried her boot knife in its
arm to the hilt, but with no more effect than bullets. The demon held her by
one shoulder and lifted her completely off the ground, then reached with its
other hand for Trent.

The rest of the team found themselves caught as easily, despite their
efforts to damage their captors. The demons took their weapons with ease, but
didn’t search them. Liv was grateful; she couldn’t stomach the thought of being
pawed by these alien creatures. She also couldn’t complete the mission without
the brain ray, but there was no way she’d be allowed to keep it.

“Jeez,” Ben complained as he hung from his ankles, “at least in Blue Beach
bullets caused them
pain
.”

Liv dangled by the scruff of her neck like a kitten. The problem was, unlike
a kitten, her neck didn’t have a scruff. The demon’s claws dug into her
shoulder with every breath.

As she swooped through the air, she caught a whiff of
rotting-flesh-and-sulfur reek and swallowed the urge to vomit.

She and the others were carried down the two flights of stairs they’d
climbed. On the main floor, Liv got only impressions: a myriad of red stone
rooms, demons walking past, a mix of demons and humans busily working at long
tables.

They went down another stair and entered a bare stone room lit by a single
ceiling fluorescent. Set into the opposite wall was a riveted metal door next
to a metal-mesh window. A demon sat in a small room on the other side of the
window. Liv blinked twice, fast, but what she saw didn’t change: a computer
monitor sat on the desk. The demon looked the group over and leaned forward to
press a button. An insectile buzz sounded and the riveted door snicked open.

Through the door lay a cellblock walled with alternating stone block and
bars. The floor was bare concrete the same red color as the stone, splotched
and stained with who-knew-what.

The demons dropped them in an empty holding area and searched them. It was
just as repulsive as Liv had anticipated it would be. The demon pulled the
brain ray from its loop and her heart sank. No chance to complete the mission
now, unless she could get it back in her hands in the next two minutes. Or find
it again and somehow get back here.

When they were done stripping the team of all equipment and weapons, the
demons threw the six of them unceremoniously through one of the cell doors. Liv
landed on her hands and knees, and the door slammed behind her as she struggled
to her feet.

She looked around to make sure her teammates were okay. They were all on
their feet, at least.

One of the demons snarled from the door, “You will wish for death after a
visit with the Wolf. Maybe we’ll be the ones to oblige.”

Their ear piercing pig-squeal laughter trailed off down the hall as they
walked away.

“So they speak English now,” Trent said.

“I guess they’ve spent some time with their captives.” Jordan didn’t look
pleased by the prospect.

“Guess we won’t be digging our way out with a spoon,” Ben said as he looked
around. The door was made of metal bars, but the walls were covered with solid
steel plate.

Connor asked, “Everybody okay?”

He got varying degrees of positive response. “Safe World on mark.”

Liv obediently reached for Safe World, but as before, she couldn’t get out
of this world.

“Fuck!” Gin said. “It doesn’t work!”

“Why not?” Connor asked, staring at Liv. The others turned to her as well.

“How the blue blazes should I know? Maybe they have a brain ray too.”

“They never gave us commands,” Trent pointed out.

“Think, Liv,” Jordan said. “How would they be able to stop us?”

Liv rubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes, trying to ease the ache
behind them and focus. “Okay. Travel requires will. It requires concentration. There
must be release of hormones and neurotransmitters to activate the areas of the
brain necessary to take us where we will. An interruption at any of those steps
could trap us here.”

“And that interruption would be delivered how?” Connor asked.

Liv shrugged absently. Her mind had engaged the problem now, and she was in
deep thought. “Toxin. Infection. Electrical impulse. Some form of radiation,
like the brain ray.”

“Is there radiation here?”

“I don’t know. They took all of my equipment.”

“Well, how do we get around the interference?”

“Connor! I don’t know how they’re delivering it. Short of breaking the
device or blocking the signal, I have no idea.”

He turned to the walls and began to methodically inspect every square inch
of their prison.

Jordan nudged Liv. “It got you a little bit.”

“What?”

He tugged at her collar and she winced in pain. She glanced at the blood
running down the front of her shirt.

“With its claws.” Jordan inspected the wound. “Doesn’t look too deep. I wish
they hadn’t taken my bandage stuff.”

“I’ll be fine. I didn’t even notice it until you said something. What about
you?”

He shook his head. “Just bruised.”

Her gaze roamed past him to their surroundings, and she wasn’t inspired by
hope. Their cell was a small box, adorned only by a steel cube ‘bed’ along the
left-hand wall and a hole in the floor in the corner that, from the smell, must
be the toilet.

Connor finished his inspection of the cell and shook his head as he sat on
the ‘bed.’ “We’re not getting out of here until they let us out. Unless you can
block the no-Travel command.”

He looked hopefully at Liv, but she only shook her head. She was still
turning the problem over in her mind, but she simply had no clue to how they had
done it.

Following Connor’s lead, the rest of the team made themselves as comfortable
as they could. Liv found herself seated against a wall between Ben and Jordan,
well back from the toilet hole.

“Did anyone else see the computer?” she asked.

Gin scowled. “Yeah. Old school tech, but still, what the hell’s it doing
here?”

“Pun intended?” Ben said with a laugh.

Gin ignored him, waiting for Jordan’s answer, but he shook his head. “I’m
surprised by the level of all of their technology. Architecture, materials
manufacture, electricity,” he gestured to the fluorescent lights overhead,
recessed behind thick steel bars.

“How did that come about?” Trent asked.

“Woolfe’s a Traveler. He could be pushing their advancement,” Jordan said.

A door in the hallway slammed, and they jerked their heads toward the cell
door. A moment later a demon appeared and pointed at Jordan. “Woolfe wants to
see you.”

The team leapt to their feet but there was nothing they could do. The demon
pushed through them, heaved Jordan up by the shoulder and left, slamming the
door behind it.

Liv ran for the door, peering through the bars, but Jordan was already out
of sight.

“We have to do something!”

“Like what?” Connor asked. His voice was overly mild, always a sign of his
temper boiling beneath the surface. “I’m open to suggestions.”

Liv wracked her brain, but there was no way out. She slumped back down in
defeat next to Ben.

“He’s tough,” Ben said, with a friendly bump to her shoulder. “He’ll be
fine.”

“Why take Jordan?” Gin asked.

“Why not?” Ben asked.

“No, really,” Gin said. “He’s not the leader, he wasn’t the one with the
brain ray, there was nothing to single him out. Why him?”

Trent said, “Maybe they want to know something. He’d be the one with the
most knowledge of demons and of other worlds.”

“But how would they know that?” Liv asked, dread twisting her stomach.

No one answered.