"But you're … you're …"
"Dead?" Nida grinned. "I was, but I am no longer."
"How?" Haatim asked. "How is this possible?"
"Maybe you should ask him." Nida gestured toward Aram.
Haatim looked at his father. Aram appeared as a man broken, looking down at the floor with a resigned expression and slumped posture. He refused to make eye contact with Haatim.
"Dad? What's she talking about?"
"I couldn't just let her go," Aram said, his voice low. "Haatim, you have to understand. I couldn't just let your sister die. Not if I had any chance to bring her back."
"What do you mean? What do you mean, you couldn't let her die?"
Aram's jaw worked, and for a moment, he looked like a man trying to swallow broken glass. "When the doctors told me there was nothing more they could do—when they said weeks, not months—I went through every option. Every one. I flew her to specialists in Berlin, in Seoul. I called in favors from Council physicians who understood things that no civilian hospital could treat. All of them said the same thing. The tumor was inoperable, and it had spread too far."
He paused, pressing his thumb and forefinger into the corners of his eyes. "Your mother stopped sleeping. She sat at Nida's bedside every night, reading to her, pretending things would be fine. But I couldn't pretend. I've spent my entire career studying what lies beyond the boundaries of natural law. I knew there were forces that could do what medicine could not."
"The Ninth Circle," Haatim whispered.
"Not at first." Aram shook his head. "I started with the Council's own archives. Old texts, forbidden rituals, accounts of miraculous healings attributed to angelic intervention. I spent weeks in the restricted section of the library, reading things that should have been destroyed centuries ago. I told myself I was just researching. Just exploring possibilities."
His voice cracked. "But the archives only led me further. One text referenced a broker—someone who operated between the Council and the Ninth Circle, facilitating exchanges that neither side acknowledged publicly. I told myself I would just make contact. Just a conversation. I would hear what they offered and walk away."
"But you didn't walk away," Haatim said.
"They knew exactly what to say." Aram's hands trembled at his sides. "They showed me things—visions of Nida healthy again, laughing, alive. They described the ritual in clinical terms, as though it were a medical procedure. A transfer of essence, they called it. They made it sound clean. Reasonable. They said the cost was minimal—access to Council security protocols, a few blind spots in our surveillance network. Things that seemed small against the weight of my daughter's life."
He finally met Haatim's gaze, and his eyes were raw. "I went to Arizona because that's where the broker arranged the ritual. I held your sister's hand while they performed it. And for three days afterward, I believed it had worked. She woke up. She recognized me. She called me Baba, the way she did when she was small."
His voice dropped to barely a whisper. "On the fourth day, I found her standing in the bathroom at three in the morning, staring at her reflection and smiling. Not Nida's smile. Something else wearing her face. And I understood what I had done."
"I'm standing right here," Nida said. "You don't have to talk about me like I'm not."
Aram glowered at her. "You are not my daughter."
"Oh, Daddy, Daddy. Why must you be so persistent in your dismissal of me? You wanted to have me back, and here I am!"
Aram turned back to Haatim. "They betrayed me. They promised they could bring Nida back, and I felt desperate enough to believe anything. And, for a while, I thought it was Nida. But it isn't her, Haatim. She never came back. This … this thing came in her place."
"Who?" A lump rose in Haatim's throat. "Who betrayed you?"
"The Ninth Circle," Aram said.
A wave of dizziness washed over Haatim. "You mean this is where it all started?" He shook his head. "You didn't just make a deal for peace, you did this?"
"I believed this would be the opening of negotiations, and that we could sue for peace after we took care of this. I never thought … they told me that if I didn't pay them …"
"All of this—all of this—is your fault?" Haatim asked, incredulous. "You try to kill Abigail and ruin Frieda after you made a deal with the Ninth Circle?"
"You don't understand." Aram held his palms up in the air and, finally, met his son's gaze. "I did all of this for you. For us. I knew how hard it was for you after she died and—"
"Don't you dare bring me into this," Haatim shouted. "I miss my sister and have wished, every single day, to see her. Not once, though, did I ask for something like this."
A heavy silence hung in the atmosphere.
"Touching, isn't it?" Nida said. However, rather than her words breaking the tension, they only enhanced it. "Oh, how I've missed you, brother."
The words hit Haatim somewhere below his ribs, in the place where grief had lived for months like a stone he'd learned to carry. His sister's voice. Not a recording, not a memory degraded by time and repetition, but her actual voice filling the room with a warmth that no one else's had ever carried.
She tilted her head—the same way Nida always had when she wanted something, chin dropped, eyes wide, one corner of her mouth lifting before the other. Their mother's gesture, passed down like an heirloom. Haatim's breath caught.
"Nida?" The name came out before he could stop it, stripped of everything except raw, desperate hope.
She stepped toward him, and the light caught the scar on her left hand—the one she'd gotten at twelve, reaching for a pan of boiling water because she'd been too impatient to wait for their father to move it. Haatim had been the one to drive her to the hospital, his learner's permit still warm in his pocket, his hands shaking on the wheel while she sat in the passenger seat telling him he drove like a grandmother.
That scar. He'd forgotten about it until this moment, and now the memory rushed back with such force that his vision blurred.
"It's really me," she said softly. She reached out and touched his arm, and her fingers were warm. Living fingers. The calluses on her palm pressed against his sleeve—she'd always had calluses from writing, pressing too hard with her pen because she refused to type her notes like everyone else.
Haatim stood very still. His body had turned traitor, leaning toward her touch the way a plant leans toward light. Months of grief—the hollow mornings, the phone he still couldn't bring himself to delete her number from, the way he'd sometimes started to text her before remembering—all of it gathered in his chest and pressed outward against his ribs.
"I used to sing to you," she said, and her voice dropped to something almost private. "When you had nightmares. You were nine, maybe ten. You'd come to my room and stand in the doorway until I woke up, and I'd sing that song Mama used to sing. You remember?"
He did. The melody surfaced unbidden, and his eyes burned.
"The fisherman," he whispered.
She smiled—Nida's smile, the real one that crinkled the skin beside her eyes. "The fisherman who caught the moon in his net and had to decide whether to keep it or throw it back."
Haatim's hand moved without his permission, reaching toward her face. His fingers stopped an inch from her cheek. Warmth radiated from her skin. She smelled like the jasmine lotion she'd always ordered from a shop in Amman because she said the American versions never got it right.
For a long moment, Haatim allowed himself to believe. He stood in the wreckage of everything his father had confessed and let the wanting consume him. His sister was alive. She was here. The universe had corrected itself, just this once, and given back what it had taken.
Then he looked into her eyes.
They were Nida's eyes—the same dark brown, the same thick lashes their mother had always envied. But something behind them watched him with a patience that Nida had never possessed. His sister had been impulsive, restless, incapable of hiding what she felt. She argued with waiters over incorrect orders and cried openly at films she claimed not to enjoy.
This thing wearing her face waited the way a spider waits. It watched his grief the way someone watches a performance, measuring his reactions, cataloguing which memories produced the strongest response. The touch on his arm, the lullaby, the scar—each one precisely deployed, precisely timed.
The realization didn't arrive like a thunderclap. It seeped in slowly, the way cold water fills a boat through a crack too small to see. His sister would not have stood there reciting memories like items on a list. Nida would have grabbed him. She would have been crying before she finished her first sentence. She would have demanded to know why he looked so thin and whether he'd been sleeping.
She would not have been watching to see if the memories worked.
Haatim pulled his hand back. The grief didn't leave—it changed shape, curling in on itself until it became something harder. Not anger, not yet. Just the particular agony of losing someone for the second time while their face still stood in front of him.
"You aren't my sister," he said. His voice came out steadier than it had any right to be.
The thing wearing Nida's face held its expression for another beat—the warm smile, the soft eyes—before letting it slide away by degrees. The warmth cooled. The smile flattened into something merely amused.
"I am, Haatim. You know that I am."
"I know that you are not." He swallowed against the ache in his throat. "Nida is dead."
The demon studied him, the last traces of his sister's warmth gone from its expression. "I look like her, though," it said. "Isn't that enough?"
"Why are you here?"
"I have some business to attend to. I must say, you've changed quite a bit since I saw you in Raven's Peak."
The hairs rose on the back of his neck and forearms. "You were there?"
Not-Nida pulled an ornamental dagger from behind her back. Long and curved, it glimmered in the light.
"I went there for this," she said. "You'd be amazed at what it can do." Then she pursed her lips. "I suppose I should say that you will be amazed at what it does. It's nearly time for things to begin."
"Why are you doing this?"
"Do you expect me to give you an honest answer? Am I to regret the error of my ways and repent? I could give you a myriad of reasons. Maybe I'm just angry that Father, here, has tried so hard to kill me over the last few months. He sent Hunters to try to murder his child."
"You are not my child."
The demon ignored him. "Or, maybe, I could just say that it's fun. I've had a lot of fun killing people, and ever since your father gave me this body, I've enjoyed so much more than I ever thought to find on the surface."
Haatim's mind scrambled. "You killed the Hunters?"
"Of course," Nida said.
Haatim turned to Aram. "The ones you told me that Abigail had killed?"
"I didn't know—"
"Spare me." Haatim turned away from Aram. "Spare me the lies. I'm done. You brought me here, demon, so what do you want. Why are we here?"
"A family reunion, of sorts," Nida said. "I need our father's assistance, and I wanted to ensure his cooperation."
"Why would he help you? All he does is manipulate and lie."
"True, but I think that underneath the ignorance and stupidity, he has a good heart and loves his family." It turned to Aram. "Tie them up."
Aram looked at Haatim. "I'm sorry."
Haatim ignored him. He'd never felt so hurt or betrayed in his life, nor so helpless.
"Come here," Aram said, grabbing a length of rope from a nearby counter. "Don't make this harder than it has to be."
"Don't do this," Haatim said. "Whatever she's planning, it's worse than anything she can do to us."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," Nida said in a silky tone. "I have a very vivid imagination."
"Don't," Haatim said, as his father approached. "Please, don't do this."
"Poor, sweet, innocent Haatim," Nida said. "Our father couldn't bear to lose me even when my time came to go. Do you think he will allow you and your mother to die if he can stop it?"
Aram grabbed Haatim's arm, refusing to make eye contact, and dragged him over toward his mother. She stood there, terrified and crying, barely conscious. It looked as if she'd received a beating sometime earlier.
Aram pulled two chairs back-to-back and sat mother and son down, and then he tied the rope around them. He pulled it tight, making sure they couldn't move.
Nida gestured with the gun for him toward the table where a duffel bag lay. "Open it," she said.
Aram did. Haatim couldn't tell what lay inside, but Aram's face fell when he looked in it.
"Enough C4 to take out the adjoining rooms as well," the demon said. "I set it for two hours, and if you get me inside fast enough, you'll get back with plenty of time to turn it off."
"It'll take forty minutes just to drive to the Council," Aram said.
"Then, we'd better hurry. Put it at their feet, and then get moving. If you try anything … anything at all, then by the time you get back here, you'll only find chunks of your family left."
"Don't go through with this," Haatim said. "She won't let us live either way."
Haatim understood, now, the demon's plan. It wanted to break into the Council and bypass the external security. With the numerous armed guards, it would prove nearly impossible to breach their defenses. Yet, no one would think to challenge one of the Council members, especially the one in charge of security.
Aram refused to look at Haatim, and the expression on his face was one of utter despair.
"It was …" He let out a shuddering breath. "This was never supposed to happen. I'm sorry, Haatim, but this is the only way to keep you safe."
He dropped the bag next to them and headed from the room. The demon walked past the chairs, leaning down to Haatim as it passed. It carried a bathroom rag and roll of tape. It shoved the rag into his mouth, and then put a line of tape over it.
"Don't worry, big brother," it said. "You'll see the real Nida soon enough."
And then it went out through the doorway, closing the door behind it. Haatim sat there, shocked and confused and with no idea of what to do.
***
Nida—or, rather, the creature that had called Nida's body home these past several months—sat in the passenger seat of Aram's car while they drove toward the gate of the Council building. With assault rifles, half-a-dozen guards watched the entrance. They wore heavy, cold gear, and the snow fell on them.
The demon flexed Nida's fingers against the armrest and studied the veins beneath the brown skin. Such a strange thing, inhabiting a body. Below, in the deeper dark, it had been formless—a hunger without edges, a will without hands. Centuries of that. Millennia, perhaps. Time moved differently when you had no pulse to measure it by.
Then the father had come. Desperate, stinking of grief and bad decisions, clutching his daughter's medical charts as though they were prayers. The broker had summoned it from the pit—not by name, because it had no name that human tongues could shape, but by appetite. They'd needed something hungry enough to fill a dying girl's body and patient enough to serve the Circle's purpose afterward.
Patient. The demon nearly smiled. Patience implied waiting, and it had done nothing but wait for longer than this man's civilization had existed. What they hadn't anticipated was that the body would come with memories. Thousands of them, woven into the muscle and bone like threads in a tapestry. The first time it opened Nida's eyes, it had been flooded with the taste of cardamom tea, the scratch of wool against small wrists, the sound of a man's voice—this man's voice, Aram's—singing an off-key lullaby in the dark.
Those memories had nearly broken it. Not from grief—demons did not grieve—but from the sheer disorientation of inheriting a life it had never lived. For three days, it had played the part of Nida so convincingly that even it couldn't tell where the girl ended and the demon began. The father had wept with joy, and the demon had felt something it could not name—not love, but a shadow of what love left behind in a body that remembered being loved.
Then the memories settled, and the demon remembered what it was. The girl's personality retreated to a dim corner—still there, still whispering occasionally, but no longer in control. And the demon had a body. Lungs that drew breath. A tongue that tasted. Hands that could touch and tear and hold.
It had no intention of giving that up. Not for the Ninth Circle, not for the father's guilt, and not for the brother's grief. The Circle wanted the Valdris bloodline's power. Fine. The demon would deliver that, because the bargain demanded it, and because the ritual would open pathways that even its masters didn't fully understand. Pathways that it intended to walk through alone.
It should begin storming imminently, perfect for what the demon had planned. Aram had quite a few mercenaries on site, as well as a few rapid response teams in the surrounding area to call in case of emergencies, but the weather would slow their timing down by quite a bit.
"I have your word?" Aram asked, as they pulled slowly up to the gate.
"Of course," Nida said. "I only want Frieda. Let me take her, and I'll go peacefully."
"What do you want with her?"
"That is between her and myself," Nida said. "Once I have dealt with her, I will leave, and you will never see me again. But, if you mess things up now, your entire family will die."
A lie, of course. Not the threat—the demon meant every syllable of that—but the promise of departure. It had no intention of disappearing. This body, this world of sensation and substance, was intoxicating in ways the Circle's handlers hadn't predicted. The smell of the snow. The satisfying crack of bone beneath Nida's knuckles. The way fear looked different on every human face, each one a unique composition of the same primal understanding.
The Circle thought it was their instrument. Their retrieval dog, sent to fetch the Valdris blood and bring it to heel. But the demon had spent months in this body, learning what it meant to have appetites, and it had developed a few of its own.
The car pulled to a stop in front of the gate, and one of the guards came up. Aram didn't respond, except to roll down his window. He handed his identification through to the man. His hand shook ever so slightly, but it could have been from the cold, and the demon doubted the guard would notice.
The man looked at the card and then at Aram. He glanced at Nida in the passenger seat. "She's with you?"
"Yes," Aram said. "She is with me, and I have given her full clearance."
"We'll need to check your car," the man said. "No exceptions."
"This is a special exception," Aram said. "And I'm in a hurry."
"Sir, I was told not to allow anyone—"
"Do you want me to speak with your supervisor?" Aram asked. "I have full authority over who is allowed or denied from your team."
The man hesitated, and then handed the card back to Aram.
"Of course, sir," he said. "My apologies. Have a nice day."
Then he stepped back and signaled for the other guards to open the gate. It slid apart, and Aram eased the car through the opening. He let out a sigh, hands clutching the steering wheel.
"Well done, Father."
"I'm not your father," Aram said, bitterness in his voice.
"Perhaps not, but perhaps indirectly," the demon said. "After all, you gave me this body and life."
"A decision I regret with every breath I take."
The words landed, and the demon felt Nida's jaw tighten—an involuntary response from the body's deep memory, the same way the girl's face had once tightened when her father raised his voice. The demon found these reflexes annoying and fascinating in equal measure. It catalogued them the way a collector catalogues specimens. This is what rejection feels like in the flesh.
Nida chuckled softly while the car drove to a stop next to a side door of the hotel and out of sight of the main gate.
"You can regret it all you want, but right now, you need to just live with it."
Guards patrolled this area, Nida knew from her earlier surveying of their defenses, but none would patrol here for another ten minutes. They climbed out, and Aram used a keycard to get them into a loading area behind the hotel for services and storage. Packed with boxes and supplies, it had a ramp leading down with a concrete floor.
"You are inside our defenses now," Aram said. "You wanted Frieda. Now, you can go get her."
"Where is she?"
"Fourth floor, third door on the left. Only one person stands guard over her. I'll wait for your return to drive you out."
"Yes," Nida said. "You will wait here."
She turned and kicked him in the side of the knee. It cracked when the cartilage snapped, and Aram staggered. He let out a sharp cry of pain and grabbed something under his shirt. He drew it out, hands shaking, but she caught his arm and swatted it away.
The gun skidded across the floor and came to a stop against the wall of the ramp. The demon forced Aram down to the ground, and then dragged him in through the doorway and out of the cold. He cried out in pain when his knee buckled under him.
"Don't be such a wuss," Nida said, closing the door behind them. "You planned to betray me?"
"I never planned for you to leave," Aram said through gritted teeth. "You are an abomination. I created you, and I fully intend to destroy you."
"I am your daughter."
"You are not my daughter." Aram's words came out low and snarly. "My daughter died."
"A pity you didn't learn that lesson months ago," Nida said. She moved to nearby pipes and eyed them over, looking for a gas line. Then she reached up and grabbed hold of one, yanking on it. The seal proved a lot tougher than she'd expected, and it would take a few tries to break it loose.
The demon considered the irony while it worked the pipe. The father had bargained his daughter's corpse for the chance to hear her voice again, and now he flinched every time it spoke. Humans were endlessly contradictory. They begged for miracles and then wept when miracles came with teeth.
"And to think, this was your plan? You thought you could bring me here and deal with me alone?"
"You are my responsibility," Aram said.
"You are weak." Nida shook her head. "If you wanted to betray me, you should have done it at the gate when you had your cronies with you."
"I did," Aram said, and then chuckled.
Nida hesitated, and then glanced over her shoulder at him. "What?"
"There are no exceptions for searching cars, even for me. They know that, and they also know certain codes for danger. Right now, they have surrounded this room to eliminate you. You won't escape this time."
Nida growled and yanked on the pipe, snapping the connection and tearing it from the wall. A hissing sound erupted while gas poured out.
Clever, she admitted to herself. Not clever enough, but more spine than she'd credited him with. The girl's memories agreed—Aram had always been sharper than he appeared, a trait Nida recalled admiring when she was alive and studying under his guidance. The demon pushed that memory away. Nostalgia was the body's weakness, not its own.
She ran over to the door that led outside. A dozen men stood out there in the snow, approaching slowly with rifles ready.
"Damn it," the demon said.
From his spot on the floor, Aram chuckled. "It's over," he said. "I made a terrible mistake bringing you back to life, and I'm sure I'll pay for what I did, but at least this nightmare is finally over."
"Oh?" Nida strode over to him and raised the pipe. "Nothing is over."
Then she swung it down, cracking him in the shoulder with the lead tube. The bone shattered, and Aram let out a scream of agony.
The demon rushed over and retrieved the gun from the floor just as the outside door breached. A canister of gas bounced across the floor, spewing as it went. It rolled to screaming Aram, releasing its contents into the air.
Nida ran to the far door, which led out of the storage room and further into the building. This one opened as well, and another canister rolled inside. She fired through the doorway, hitting one guard in the shoulder as he tried to duck out of the way.
They started to close the door, planning to let the gas knock her unconscious. The canister spewed its fumes, but they had no effect on her. Nida charged straight into the door just before it latched, slamming it open with her entire body weight. The edge hit one man squarely in the chest, knocking him back and into the others.
Four guards in total. She caught her balance and raised the pistol, firing it into the face of the nearest man.
The others tried to respond, raising their rifles to react in kind, but they stood too close for such long-range weapons to be of much use. The demon stepped in and kicked one man in the chest, knocking him to the ground, and then fired two more bullets into the chest of another.
The first man, whom she'd shot in the shoulder, swung his gun around one-handed and pulled the trigger, firing off a spray of wild shots at her. One clipped her shoulder, but the rest went over her head. She turned and fired, shooting him in the throat and silencing him, for good this time.
The last guard had just begun to get his bearings and recover from the initial attack, but Nida reacted considerably faster. She fired off the last few shots from her clip into him. He staggered back into the wall and slid to the floor, head hanging on his chest, and a trail of blood above and behind him.
Behind her, the other team had fully breached the loading area and now charged into the room, wearing masks. The gas from their canister still hung in the air, obscuring their sight of her, but the domestic gas also filled the area from the pipe she'd ripped from the wall.
One of them saw her and raised his rifle, pulling the trigger. The spark ignited the gas, and a cloud of fire appeared in the center of the room, washing over them. A wall of hot air buffeted the demon. The ignited gas disappeared in a flash, but not without consequences. A few men dove aside in terror, and one man's coat caught on fire.
Many of them, however, kept shooting and ignored the distraction. Nida grabbed an assault rifle from a guard and returned fire, forcing them to duck and find cover. Then she slipped a knife loose and cut the shoulder strap to separate the gun from the guard.
The demon threw the door shut behind her and sprinted down the hall, and bullets tore through the wood behind her and ripped into the walls.
Another shot clipped her leg, but not squarely enough to disable her. Nida rounded the corner and headed into the boiler room, where the furnace was located. Also where the backup generator lived, which should kick on and maintain the electric fence if the external power got cut.
There would be more guards alerted to her presence now, but that was to be expected. Things had actually gone rather well, considering. She ran to the huge gas storage tank and pulled a two-kilogram brick of C4 out of her pocket, as well as a detonator.
Nida put them on the valve, attached the detonator, and set the timer for fifteen seconds.
Then she sprinted further into the building, heading for the stairwell leading up. Shouting came from behind as the guards gave chase. She made it to the second-floor landing, turned back, and waited. A guard rounded the corner, and the demon opened fire into his chest.
A few more guards hesitated, popping around the corner and shooting up at her. Nida ducked back, satisfied that she'd held them up long enough, and given them a reason to be more cautious. She sprinted up the stairs, and a few seconds later, the C4 detonated.
The building shook, and a rush of hot air blasted up the stairwell. The tank wouldn't completely explode, but the detonation would have ripped a hole in the side. At the very least, it had taken out the generator and sparked countless fires that would keep going for hours. The gas would continue to spill out and burn, causing significant damage difficult to contain.
Nida heard no more guards behind her while she ran up the flights of stairs. She hadn't caught them all in the explosion but doubted they would be ready to continue the fight, at least for a few more minutes.
The demon hadn't expected Aram to betray her but had prepared for it. To be honest, she even felt a little impressed that he hadn't just lain down and taken everything she threw at him. Perhaps some of the girl's memories were accurate after all. The real Nida had always believed her father would protect the family at any cost, and the old man had proven her right—just not in the way anyone had anticipated.
She'd hoped to have Frieda and be on her way out before calling in her soldiers, but it looked like she would need to improvise.
Nida pulled a small device from her pocket and pressed a button. It sent a signal to the two teams of mercenaries hidden in the woods outside the hotel. Their first action would be to cut the power, and with the backup generator already out of commission, they would have no trouble breaching the fence.
With the distraction and chaos happening inside, they would have no trouble launching their small war against the Council.
Their orders were to kill everyone.
With ease, Nida found the room that Aram had mentioned. No guard stood out front, but a chair did show where a guard should have been sitting. It looked like he had abandoned his post.
This was, indeed, where they held Frieda. Aram hadn't even managed to lie to her about it and cost her more time. Alarms blared now, filling the halls with noise and contributing to the chaos.
A few seconds later, the power went out. The hallway went completely dark, and it took a second for her eyes to adjust. They would scramble now to get the generator back online, and if there had been only minimal damage, it might only cost them a couple of minutes, but it would be enough.
Nida opened the door to Frieda's room and stepped inside. Movement registered a second later, and the demon ducked just as Frieda swung a cabinet door at her head. It hit against the wall, snapping in half, and then Frieda came charging out at her with a flurry of attacks.
Nida danced back, creating some distance, and then she burst out laughing. "Wasn't expecting that!"
Frieda didn't respond. Instead, she charged forward, dropping the broken pieces of the cabinet onto the floor and launching another strike at Nida, aiming for her face and chest with her attacks. Frieda wasn't terrible, and with the recent wounds on Nida's body, the demon noticed it becoming more difficult to move but realized that Frieda wouldn't be a match for her.
Frieda had modest training but wasn't a soldier. Nida deflected her first several attacks, and then countered with a series of blows, knocking Frieda back into the wall, kneeing her hard in the stomach, and then elbowing her in the back of the head.
Frieda collapsed to the ground with a groan, trying to pick herself up. She fell again, disoriented.
"Surrender," Nida said, stepping away.
Frieda rolled over and kicked out at Nida's legs. The demon backpedaled, easily avoiding the attack, and Frieda found her feet. She charged back in, swinging with abandon and trying to take the demon down.
Nida stepped back, and her left leg almost gave out because of the bullet wound. She staggered, caught her balance, and then waited for Frieda to approach. This time, when Frieda came in, she hit her hard in the chest with an open palm, and then followed through with a low kick to the back of Frieda's legs, throwing her to the ground once more.
"I don't want to kill you, but I don't need you alive either. All I need is your blood."
Frieda tried to get up again, but Nida stepped on her chest, pinning her down.
"Why?"
The demon smiled, sliding the ornate dagger free and holding it up to the light. "Your blood is special. Surely you know what flows through your veins?"
When Frieda didn't respond, Nida laughed. "They never told you? How delicious. The great Head of Hunters, ignorant of her own heritage." She knelt down, keeping Frieda pinned. "Your bloodline—the Valdris line—is one of the seven founding families who sealed the barriers between realms eight centuries ago. Their blood was used to close the gates, and only that same blood can open them again."
Frieda's eyes widened. "That's not possible. The founding families died out centuries ago."
"Most of them, yes. Hunted. Murdered. Their lines ended deliberately by those who feared what their blood could do." Nida traced the dagger along Frieda's cheek without breaking skin. "But the Valdris line survived. Hidden. Forgotten. Until you."
"You're lying."
"Am I? Think about it. Why do you think the Council chose you to lead the Hunters? Why did Arthur mentor you personally? Why has your family always been protected, generation after generation, even when others were left to die?" Nida's smile turned cruel. "Your blood is a key, Frieda. The only key that can unlock what my masters want released. Every other bloodline was diluted or destroyed. Only yours remains pure enough to work the ritual."
Frieda reached up and grabbed Nida's leg and rolled, throwing her off-balance and toward the floor. The demon hit the ground and rolled, finding her balance a few feet away just as Frieda stood.
She rushed back in at Frieda, deflecting a few clumsy attacks and hitting the woman hard in the face, breaking her nose. Frieda staggered back, dazed, and Nida caught her arm. She sliced the wrist, and Frieda jerked back as blood dripped out.
Nida chanted a few quick words, holding the blade up with the blood on it. After a few seconds, the hallway grew hot, as though someone had turned up the temperature by twenty degrees. The blood that had fallen to the floor sizzled and boiled, and then ate through the carpet like acid.
Frieda watched it in horror. "What the hell is that?"
"Proof of what I told you. Your blood carries the essence of the old seals—the same power your ancestors used to bind the barriers. When channeled properly, it can burn through anything. Or open doorways that have been closed for centuries." Nida smiled. "I don't need much of it, but a renewable source is always preferable."
Frieda stared at her for a second, and then turned and sprinted down the hallway, heading toward the stairwell. The demon caught her after only a few steps, knocking her to the ground and slamming her head into the floor. Frieda groaned and thrashed, but Nida had no trouble keeping a hold on her.
She tore off a part of Frieda's shirt and tied it around her wrist, staunching the flow of blood.
"There we are, that's better."
"You won't get away," Frieda said, dazed.
"On the contrary," Nida said. "I already have."
She forced Frieda to her feet and pushed her toward the stairwell. Blue security lights flickered to life, and the alarms sounded again, but all too late. The demon's soldiers would have had plenty of time.
As soon as they headed down, gunshots echoed up. The sound brought a smile to Nida's lips. Her small army had breached the fence and had set about cleaning up the defenses outside while the disorganized and scattered guards tried to mount countermeasures.
By the time they made it to the lobby, Nida's forces had complete control of the exterior of the facility. The team totaled twenty soldiers, most of them human, but with a few demons mixed in. One of them came over to her as she pushed Frieda to the exit.
"Is our train ready?"
"Yes, sir," the soldier said. He might have been attractive, once, but his rotted face betrayed that he'd been dug up a few weeks ago. "It will arrive in fifteen minutes and wait for us. We've locked down the station."
"Good. Send the soldiers door-to-door. Kill everyone," Nida said. "No one can be left alive."
"Yes, sir."
"And do it fast. We leave shortly. We have what we came for."
The man nodded, and the soldiers moved into the building. Nida pushed Frieda out into the snow and toward one of the parked cars. Outside lay the bodies of several soldiers, who had gotten gunned down when the attack started. A few of the casualties came from her team but most belonged to the Council.
The demon pushed Frieda into the backseat and turned to survey the havoc she'd wreaked. The hotel had set on fire and smoldered on the far side of the building where she'd blown up the generator. Part of it had collapsed. It would burn slowly for many more hours, and with the storm, it would take a long time before any help could arrive.
By that time, the Council would be gone.
Gunshots sounded from inside the building while her team mopped up the Council members. All of them in one location: she couldn't have asked for a better present from her arrogant father.
The snow collected on the demon's shoulders while it stood in the parking lot, watching. From somewhere deep inside the body, a whisper surfaced—faint, formless, more sensation than thought. The girl. The real Nida. She stirred occasionally, usually when the demon was near the family, and the whisper always carried the same wordless quality: grief, and confusion, and a desperate reaching toward something just out of grasp.
The demon let the moment pass. It always did. The girl was too weak to take control, too broken by what had been done to her body and her death and her resurrection into this half-life. She would fade again in a few seconds, sinking back into the dark corner where the demon had pushed her.
But the demon remembered the lullaby. Aram's off-key voice in the dark, singing a song in Arabic that the girl had loved. The body remembered it in the bones, in the throat muscles that wanted to hum along. The demon did not hum. But it did not push the memory away, either.
A glorious day, indeed.
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