The exorcist switched to Latin, and even though Katia knew almost nothing of the ancient language, the power behind the words stole her breath away. The phrases rolled off Simon’s tongue, growing in intensity, as his body vibrated with the strength of the Light that flowed through him. Around them, the walls of the ancient library began to buckle and warp as the illusion failed. With a resounding crack, it returned to normal, just a cluttered home office with long scratches in the wood paneling.

  As Mr. Russell crumpled to the floor, drawing himself into a fetal position, whimpering, Katia finally got a good look at the demon. Definitely a Hypno-Fiend, short in stature, about four feet tall. Its body was clad in light armor with arms that ended in hooked talons. A long sword appeared, and with a growl, the fiend launched itself at them, slashing at the protective circle. With each strike a near-deafening boom struck her ears, making her head pound.

  Katia shifted her weight, tightening her grip on the pipe, though if she attacked it, it’d be like beating at a grizzly bear with a toothpick. To her relief, the circle continued to pulse with each blow, but it held. Simon’s voice rose, the Latin coming faster now. His eyes seemed to be a brighter blue, as if the words were changing him from within.

  The fiend’s blows weakened, then it fell to its knees.

  “By the power of the Almighty, the Creator of the Universe, I cast you into the prison from which there is no escape!” Simon cried.

  With a terrified shriek, the fiend abruptly vanished in a puff of acrid smoke. There was noise now, the rattle of the metal box near Simon’s feet as an unearthly howl came from within.

  Katia’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. Not only had he exorcised the demon out of Mr. Russell, he’d sent it into that metal box. A box that was inside the protective circle.

  Holy . . . How did he do that?

  She raised her eyes from the box to the exorcist who was bent over at the waist, sucking in air, and trembling.

  That was badass.

  As Simon gasped for air, a prayer of thanks came between those gasps. When he finally straightened up, he looked over at Katia, then laughed, the sound of deepest relief.

  “As Riley would say: Exorcist 1, Fiend 0.” he said, smiling. “It is a joyous thing when it all goes right.”

  She took a deep breath, then another, her heart still pounding.

  “How did you do that?” she said, pointing toward the box. It kept thumping like the demon was hammering on the walls with its fists.

  “Faith,” he said. “If you think this was weird, wait until the walls ooze blood. That’s particularly gross.” He glanced up. “Though I really did like this illusion. Best one so far.”

  A groan issued from Mr. Russell, who was still curled up on the floor. Simon dismissed the circle to check on the recently dispossessed. It took some encouragement but finally Russell sat upright, his eyes riveted on the snarling box.

  “I didn’t do a thing! I didn’t summon it, I didn’t make a deal with any demon,” he insisted. “They’ll think I got on the bestseller’s list because I sold my soul. No way. I’m not that stupid.”

  “Sometimes demons just pick random people to torment,” Simon explained. “We’ll anoint you with Holy Water before we leave and then you should have your priest come in and do a thorough blessing of your apartment.”

  “I will. I will. After I meet my deadline.” Russell groaned again, his head in his hands.

  It took Simon another ten minutes to convince him that having the priest come today was a smart move. To her relief, a dab of Holy Water proved the man’s soul was still his own, though Russell was quite offended they’d felt the need to check. After Katia found his office chair, she helped him into it. His hair was mussed, his face in need of a shave and his shirt filthy. A shower, maybe two, were in his future.

  “What am I going to do? I’m so behind. My editor will shoot me,” the man complained. “She gets very upset if I’m late with my manuscript.”

  Katia traded a look with Simon, who shrugged.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll catch up,” she said. This guy had no clue how close he’d come to spending eternity missing deadlines in Hell.

  “She’s not going to believe me. No way.”

  “If your editor needs some sort of official report about what happened here, I can provide it,” Simon offered. That seemed to settle Russell more than anything they’d said so far. “One question. That library we saw. Does it actually exist?”

  The author thought for a time, then nodded as if a few more cobwebs had been swept out of his brain.

  “It’s the Biblioteca Joanina. In my story, my heroine finds a murdered priest there. The library is in Portugal, at the University of Coimbra. I visited it last summer. I have a book about it here somewhere,” he said, looking around at the trashed office in bewilderment.

  “That’s our cue to go,” Simon said quietly. He picked up the metal box holding the demon and headed for the door, Katia right behind him. “I’ll send a message to your wife, so she knows you’re okay.”

  “Huh? Oh. Thanks,” the man said, rummaging around in the scorched pile of paper on the floor. “Where are my notes for chapter twenty-nine? I have to find those!”

  More rummaging was followed by a curse. Apparently, that chapter was going to be delayed.

  TEN

  While they descended to the lobby, Simon called Mrs. Russell and relayed the good news. He also insisted that a priest bless the apartment as soon as possible. She promised to make that happen, no matter what her spouse said, and then began to cry.

  Once the call ended, he explained, “Usually, I’d do the blessing myself, but not today. The blessing can take some time, and I don’t want to get in the middle of one and have to leave for another exorcism.”

  When they approached the guard to sign out, Nia eyed the box with the yowling demon. “Oh good, you got it,” she said.

  “You don’t seem surprised that’s why we were here,” Simon said.

  “It’s happened before in one of the other apartments. I keep telling the condo association they need to use Holy Water to secure the entrances, but they don’t want to spend the money. Lobby full of marble and these guys are cheapskates,” she said, shaking her head in despair.

  “Which is why you get these fiends,” he replied, hefting the box.

  “Amen. Now if you ask me—”

  A resounding plop made Katia pause as she signed them out. “What was that?”

  The guard didn’t reply. Instead, she pointed behind them.

  In the middle of the lobby was a Hellspawn, but not one Katia had ever seen before. It was about six feet tall, and about as wide, with the kind of spindly legs a flamingo would envy. It reminded her of a lime green beach ball with feet. Branching out from the thing were six sets of tentacles, three to a side. Slitted amber eyes blinked at them. Then it cackled in a high-pitched voice like it was enjoying a good joke.

  “What the hell is that?” she asked.

  “Another demon,” Simon replied.

  She shot him a frown. “What. Kind. Of. Demon?”

  “No clue. I’ve never seen one like that before. Lucifer can create new fiends anytime he likes. Looks like he just did.”

  “Great, just great.” Katia swore under her breath.

  There was another one of those infernal cackles, the kind that made your skin pebble and your heart skip beats.

  “Nia, we’ll need you to keep the residents out of the way,” Simon said. “We have no idea what we’re up against here.”

  Though still stunned by the sight of the bizarre Hellspawn in her lobby, Nia muttered, “Will do.”

  Katia Allyson Breman. The Betrayer will be mine. He will cower at my feet like a beaten dog. Give me your soul and you will live.

  She grimaced at the power in that demand, even stronger than it had been upstairs with the writer. No. Not happening.

  Then die, mortal!

  The ball-shaped fiend promptly changed colors to a startling red, so red it almost glowed from within. Then it opened its mouth, which kept expanding until it was the entire width of the demon. It had no teeth, which wasn’t usual for Hellspawn.

  Something the color of a moldy lime plopped out of the thing’s mouth, hitting the floor with a splat. About the size of an over-inflated basketball, it rolled a short distance and then unfolded to reveal a miniature version of the bigger fiend.

  “Oh, great, it’s having babies now,” Katia grumbled.

  “Just one of them. We can handle it.”

  Even before he finished speaking, two more fell onto the marble floor. Then it was an assembly line, as twelve hideous fiends launched themselves out of the big thing’s mouth, one after another. Finally, it belched and stopped generating copies of itself.

  Katia shot her companion a horrified look.

  “At least they don’t have teeth,” he said.

  The cackle came yet again, and in response the smaller Hellspawn began to wave their tentacles around, only to have them sprout rows and rows of needlepoint fangs. Katia swore she saw bits of flesh caught in some of them.

  “Just had to mention the teeth thing, didn’t you?” she snarled.

  A mumbled “sorry” returned.

  “No, Mrs. Horner! Go back outside!” the guard called out, then set off at a trot toward the front doors. A gray-haired lady had just entered, a pocket-sized puppy at her side on a sparkly leash. Totally engrossed in her phone conversation, she ignored the warning. At least until her dog spied the fiends and lost its little mind in a shrill series of frantic barks.

  “Get out of here!” Nia shouted.

  The woman finally acknowledged the threat, then calmly tucked the phone in her purse, gave a firm tug on the leash and headed back outside. The dog, not quite so mellow, kept up its racket until the doors closed behind it.

  “Thank God,” Simon whispered.

  In the time it’d taken to get the tenant out the door, the largest demon had grown in size again, its skin revealing that infernal red glow. It appeared that even more baby fiends were keen to make their appearance.

  There was only one way to stop this. “Can you clear me a path to that big one?” she asked.

  “Maybe. What are you going to do?”

  Something told Katia not to voice her plan. “Just trust me.”

  Her companion’s worried eyes met hers. “You got it.”

  Then to Katia’s astonishment, the exorcist tightened his grip on his steel pipe and marched straight into the mass of tentacles.

  Even before Simon began batting the fiends aside, he’d been bitten, a sharp pain in the back of his left leg. Grabbing the offending monster, he tossed it away, then began a systematic sweep back and forth with his pipe. Thunk, a fiend went flying, thunk and another sailed away waving its tentacles in fury. Two more bit him, the wounds burning like they were bathed in acid.

  Simon kept moving, knowing to slow down would only gain him more bites and ruin any chance of Katia’s plan. Whatever that was. Only now did it occur to him that what he was doing was suicidal if she didn’t back him up. Had Azagar already made his offer and she’d accepted it?

  The Big Mouth demon swung a tentacle toward him, and he staggered back, stepping on one of the little fiends to avoid having his throat ripped out. Teetering for a moment, he barely regained his balance. He kept bashing the monsters, but there seemed to be no end of them. When one of the long tentacles came close again, he smacked it, hard, generating a throaty roar.

  A blur flew past him—Katia—sliding through the tangle of Hellspawn, as she leapt up and slam-dunked the Holy Water sphere directly into the large fiend’s gaping mouth. For a second nothing happened, then a burst of glass and liquid cut off the Hellspawn’s strangled cry.

  The rustling of the smaller fiends suddenly ceased, even as Katia twisted out of the reach of the big one’s tentacles. She kicked her way through a knot of the lesser demons, breathing heavily.

  “The Holy Water didn’t work!”

  At first, he thought she was right, but from where she stood, Katia couldn’t see the fiend’s eyes widen, its body beginning to swell, its skin pulling tighter and tighter, almost as if . . .

  “Run!” Simon shouted.

  He had almost made it back to the guard’s desk when Lucifer’s newest creation exploded. Like an egg in a microwave, bits of Hellspawn flew upward in a grisly fountain, body parts striking the walls, the lights and the bystanders. When it finally stopped raining demon guts, tentacles, and a single large eyeball, the lobby grew eerily silent.

  Nia peered out from behind her desk. “Damn,” the woman said, then grinned. “You killed them all!”

  As Simon rose from the floor, he realized she was right. Not only was the big fiend so much sushi, all the little ones had melted like marshmallows over a hot bonfire.

  “Man, that’s gross,” Katia said, slipping on the wet floor as she joined them. Every few steps something nasty would fall off her clothes.

  “That was an impressive slam-dunk,” he said.

  Her smile was one of true pride. “Guess who was on the high school championship basketball team and scored the most points?” she asked, waggling her eyebrows.

  “Katia from Kansas?” She nodded happily. “I was into track and field. Basketball was never my thing.”

  “So, between us we’ve got ‘throwing stuff at demons and then running away’ totally covered?”

  Simon burst out laughing. “That’s it exactly.” He held up a hand and they high fived. “Good Guys 3, Hell 0.”

  “More like fifteen what with all those little bastards.”

  When he looked back at the carnage, he kept the groan to himself. No way could they leave this mess to some poor underpaid janitor.

  “We need to clean this up ourselves in case these things have a way of regenerating,” he said.

  “They can do that?” Katia asked, her smile fading at the thought.

  “They can do anything their master wants them to do.”

  “Ugh,” she said. “Just ugh.”

  While Nia was walking around the edges of the mess, shaking her head, and doing a running commentary on what she was seeing, they treated their wounds with Holy Water, the papal variety. Simon would normally use the locally produced version, but it was vital that neither of them fell ill today. Still, he made sure not to waste any of the precious liquid.

  Sitting in the guard’s chair, Katia at his feet, he winced as she applied some to the vicious bite on his calf.

  “It needs a bandage. Maybe stitches,” was her professional opinion.

  It probably did, but he was going to ignore it for the time being. Just as they finished, a strange crackling sound began, causing the two of them to turn back toward the fiendish splotches. Uneasy, Simon picked up his pipe from where it had fallen. The crackling continued, and then slowly faded away.

  “Well, look at that,” Nia said, pointing.

  Katia walked up to the nearest pile of demon remains and nudged it with the toe of her shoe. What had been gelatinous liquid was now grains of glistening green sand. “Huh.”

  “Y’all going to need a broom. Or two,” the guard said as she headed off. “I’ll be right back.”

  Katia gave him a side eye. “This the usual thing for your city?”

  “A new type of demon? No. We must be special.”

  The irritated huff that came his way told him what she thought of that. “Lucky us,” she muttered, then headed in the direction Nia had gone.

  As his bites burned and sweat broke out on his forehead, Simon began documenting the demonic remains, one cell phone image at a time. So far, they’d outfoxed Azagar. He wondered how long their luck would hold.

  ELEVEN

  It took time to sweep up all the demon remains and bag them, though Nia had helped them with the process. Then Simon insisted that they treat the lobby with the local Archdiocese’s Holy Water, which was packaged in quart bottles, the kind the trappers used. That had required a trip to his car and more digging around in the trunk.

  Katia had taken over that task as she could tell the wound on his leg was hurting him. He’d also insisted that a small amount of Holy Water be added to every trash bag “just in case.” Then he’d made sure those bags went in his trunk because he didn’t want to leave them behind. No one could complain about this guy not being thorough.

  Simon was in the car now, in the driver’s seat with his foot propped on the dashboard as he applied a bandage to his leg. At least the wound had stopped bleeding. Other than a few aches, Katia wasn’t feeling many ill effects from the bites, so that was a blessing.

  “I’ll need to tell Master Blackthorne that there’s a new demon,” she said. “I should have got a picture of that monster, but I didn’t.”

  “I have some.”

  She stared at him. “You actually took pictures during all that?”

  “Sure,” he said, as if everyone had the presence of mind to capture the moment when they faced a truly lethal horde of flesh-eating fiends. “Father Rosetti will want to warn the other exorcists. I’ll send a copy of the pictures to you, at least if they turned out decent. Tell Riley how you killed it. That’ll earn you big points.”

  “I only got close to it because of you,” she argued. “They would have chewed me to bits if I’d tried that on my own.”

  Simon shrugged, as if his part had been no big deal.

  This guy is unreal. When the box at her feet rattled again, Katia glared at it. She’d almost forgotten about the Four they’d exorcised from the illusionary library. “What do you do with this thing? Take it to a demon trafficker?”

  “No, not this one. A demon who possesses a mortal may return to that person if it somehow gets free. This one goes somewhere else, where it will be dealt with.”