Fic: The Adamant Blade (Chapter Five)
Steve looked at his watch. Just twenty minutes since he'd watched Danny step off this plane of existence. He turned and paced down the corridor of the apartment, peering through the spy-hole in the door to check the hall outside. Danny had said to make sure whoever owned the place didn't come back and close the portal, and checking the apartment was a whole lot easier than standing, staring at the gap in reality.
He'd done that for a few minutes, hoping Heather was right on the other side and Danny would immediately step right back through. When he didn't, Steve watched it some more, trying to get a read on what it was he was actually seeing.
He could feel the power inside of the circle as a gentle hum against his mind when he stepped too close, and there was a ragged gash that hung in the air. An infectious yellowy light seemed to ooze out of the tear, spilling on the cement floor and spreading out towards the edges of the circle. Steve wondered if it was his imagination, when the light seemed to hesitate as it hit Danny's power, but it didn't hold it long.
When Danny stepped into the demon dimension, Steve had seen his hair ruffle in a breeze he couldn't feel in the room. He guessed that phantom wind was what brought the smell that followed the light out of the circle. The closest he could come to classifying it in his head was a dead body in a volcano. He'd been to the Volcanoes National Park, walked through Kīlauea's sulfurous fumes, and he'd smelled enough death to know the separate smells, he just kind of wished he'd never been exposed to what he thought they would smell like combined.
Poking his head into the smaller bedroom, he glared at the papers that were stacked everywhere. He needed to go through them but couldn't when he was in an unsecured scene with his partner in danger. Not for the first time he wished the other half of the team was there with him and Danny. Wondering what the cousins would make of the things he'd seen and heard in the past couple of days, he pulled out his phone and dialed Chin's number. He wasn't going to tell him anything about the weird stuff, at least not yet, but he could get him and Kono looking into who owned the apartment.
“Hozit, Steve?” Chin said, as his answered.
“Danny and I are onto something,” Steve said, knowing that wasn’t really what Chin wanted to hear but he didn't really know how to begin to explain what he was really feeling. “I need you to check out a lead for us.”
“Sure,” Chin agreed, letting Steve's non-answer slide. “What do you need?”
“I need to know who owns or rents an apartment.”
“Give me the address, and I'll get on it as soon as I get to the office.” Steve cursed himself for forgetting the time difference, but knew that Chin and Kono would expect him to call whenever he or Danny needed anything, whatever the time.
“I'm not sure,” Steve had to admit, kicking himself for not paying enough attention on the drive over. “Can you ping my phone? I'm in apartment 307 if you can.”
“Where are you?” Chin asked, rightly suspicious that Steve didn’t know where he was.
“Upper West Side,” Steve told him, wishing he had been paying more attention. “Danny was driving. And I had some things to think about.”
“You okay, Steve?”
“Yeah, brah,” Steve said with a sigh. “There's just a lot of stuff going on.”
“How's Danny?”
“Okay, in the circumstances,” Steve said, hedging his answer slightly. No way was he going to tell Chin he'd let Danny go off on his own, and no way was he going to try to explain what was happening over the phone.
Chin was silent for a moment, obviously trying to work out if he could push for more answers. Steve hoped he wouldn't, not wanting to have to lie, but being prepared to if necessary. This was Danny's secret, and he'd kept it for all the time he'd known them, he wasn't going to break that confidence.
“I'll get on this,” Chin said, and Steve let out a breath. “Give Danny our love and take care of him.”
“Sure,” Steve said, thumbing his phone off before he could say anything stupid.
Steve had just turned back towards the kitchen of the apartment when he heard a creaking noise from the main bedroom behind him. It sounded like old floorboards straining under the weight of something huge. Steve had his gun out, easing carefully towards the room before he'd even processed the sound. There was no way anyone had gotten past him into the room, so that meant someone, or something, had come out of the portal.
He edged round the door, leading with his gun, knowing that he was going to find something in the circle. If it had been Danny, he would have called to him, broken the circle and come out to meet him. So logic told him there was going to be something there that shouldn't be. Knowing it, and seeing it, were very different things though.
It was big, taller than he was, and seemed to barely fit its bulk into the space inside the circle. The thing turned towards him, creaking as it moved its spiny head and twisted its limbs to avoid touching the boundary of power Danny had created. Steve figured it was looking at him, although he wasn't sure what it could see, as its eye sockets were empty. Its lip-less mouth twisted into something that was probably a smile but it made Steve want to run screaming from the room.
Part of Steve's mind was trying to tell him that what he saw was a bland looking man in a suit. And when he blinked he saw after images of the man against the black body of the creature. He guessed that the image was some kind of disguise the thing, the demon, projected to hide its true form. He was just glad the power Danny had poured into the magic circle was containing the thing and interfering with its power.
“You can see me as I am?” the thing asked him, its head cocked slightly to one side as it considered him. “How interesting.”
The words were like finger nails on a blackboard, like glass shattering right inside his head. The thing's mouth was still fixed in a dreadful grin, and Steve was fairly sure its voice was bypassing his ears altogether. His spine felt like jelly and he wanted nothing more than to walk away and not have to look at the thing any more, but he took a breath and faced his fear. “Go back through the portal.”
The demon laughed and the sound made Steve spine want to crawl in his skull and hide. Squaring his shoulders, he stepped closer to the circle, his gun up. He was totally going to punch Danny in his stupid face when he got back for not giving him the right intel to deal with the situation. He hated being under-prepared, and there was no excuse for it other than his partner's reluctance to talk about this side of his life. That was not happening from now on.
“Go back through the portal,” Steve repeated, feeling a little more in control now he had a plan, even if it was just a plan to shout at Danny.
“And will you shoot me if I don't?” the demon asked, a little too unconcerned about the prospect for Steve's liking.
Steve didn't answer. He might not be exactly trained to deal with demons, but he figured they couldn't be all that different from any enemy he'd faced. He just had to think about what he said, make sure he gave away less information than he got in return, but with the added pressure that this opponent might actually eat him if he failed.
Would a bullet break the magic circle? Maybe. Danny also said that guns wouldn't do anything to help him against demons, but that was in their dimension. Would they work here? He had no idea. He lowered his gun, not willing to get rid of it entirely but ready to trust the magic circle for now.
The thing moved again with a creaking of limbs and a waft of the smell of rotting corpses overlaid with jasmine which made Steve want to vomit. He was suddenly back in Iraq, hiding in a ditch under the decaying bodies of two dead Iraqis, while insurgents searched for him. He'd laid there unmoving for thirty six hours, with the pungent smell of jasmine and the buzzing of flies the only distraction from wondering how many of his team were dead.
“That's it,” the demon said, its smug voice cutting through the hallucination. “That's what I needed.”
Steve took a hold of himself, pushing the memories away. He thought about all the things he'd done since then, about how his SEAL team were all okay, how his new team were family, about how he needed to stay strong to get Danny back.
“It won't work,” Steve said, mentally pushing back against the demon. He wasn't sure that the creeping sensation he could feel prickling at the edges of his mind was really the creature, but the smell of jasmine and the buzzing of flies diminished when he fought it.
“You are stronger than you look, human,” the demon said, looking a little less smug, Steve thought, although he wasn't sure how he could tell. “This will be entertaining. I shall enjoy breaking you.”
“I've withstood worse than you,” Steve said, determinedly not thinking about all the terrible things he'd seen or done in his life.
The creature laughed again, and Steve felt a push in his mind. Clawed fingers scratched at his consciousness, prying the edges loose and looking for a way in. Steve locked his knees against the urge to collapse to the floor, and pulled on all his training to harden his mind. He would do this, he could do this, he had to do this for Danny.
Danny still hadn't found Heather, and it had been fifty eight hours since he stepped through the portal. At least that's what his watch had told him, but he suspected that time was passing more quickly for him than it was back in the real world. He hoped so, because he didn't want to think about Steve waiting for him all that time.
He didn't feel tired or hungry, which he thought supported his idea that it hadn't really been over two days since he arrived in the demon dimension. Even if there had been anything that looked remotely edible, he wouldn't have eaten it. He wasn't sure how it worked, but he figured eating there probably gave the things he could feel at the edge of his mind power over you. Or you wouldn't be able to leave. A bit like visiting Nana.
Following where the gris-gris was leading him, he'd walked for miles through a blasted landscape of rocks and dead, twisted trees. He'd not seen another living thing, demon or human, in the whole time, and he was starting to feel like he was going crazy. Sure he'd seen the same rocks and trees several times, he was starting to wonder if the gris-gris wasn't leading him on a wild goose chase.
What if Heather wasn't really here? How long could he spend wandering without finding her? He couldn't abandon Heather, he knew that, but he had Grace to think of. And Steve. He really hoped his partner had thought to call his mom, or Mack, to come and help him watch the portal. The idea of the stoic goof waiting for him, on his own, for god knows how long made Danny feel like turning around right now.
But he didn't. Instead he plodded on through the rocks, avoiding the weirdly colored pools that grew to be an increasing hazard. The place reminded him of Mordor. It wasn't so much the movie he imagined, rather it was Rachel's voice reading to him in the early days of their marriage that he heard in his mind. She was appalled over the gaps in his reading, but Lord of the Rings was the one that she'd decided to read to him. She was a Tolkien nut, on the sly, and he'd loved that he was one of the only people in the whole world who knew that.
They'd been so in love, back then, and Danny could clearly remember the feeling that he wanted to share everything with her. And yet he'd never involved her in this part of his life, like he had with Steve. Yes, Steve had kind of bulled his way into it, but Danny could have insisted he stay in Hawai'i, and he would have done, in the end. His partner had the training to take care of himself, unlike Rachel. But neither did Heather and his mom and they were more a part of the odder side of life than even he was. Danny did wonder what that said about his feelings for his partner, but he pushed it aside, happy to live in denial for a while longer, at least until he found Heather.
He clambered up a scree slope of sharp, blood red pumice like rocks, that scraped his hands and crunched under his sneakers. Not sure what instinct told him to duck down as he reached the top, but he was glad he did, because on the other side of the ridge, in a little valley filled with a jumble of black rocks, was Heather. She was sitting, legs crossed, safe inside a circle she'd scraped in the earth, and looked okay as far as he could tell. It was the things surrounding the circle that really worried Danny.
There was four of them, about the size of mastiff dogs, and they looked like something normally carved in stone, on the outside of churches; snarling teeth filled mouths in ugly faces, little horns and all. Their leathery wings flapped angrily as they threw themselves at the circle, crashing into the shield Heather had made around herself. Each time one of them hit it, there was a flicker of power in the air and a whine of energy discharging.
They were all focused on Heather, which was good in one respect, as it allowed Danny some time to think about what he was going to do to get her out. On the other hand he wasn't sure how long she'd been withstanding the creatures and he had no idea how long she could last.
He slid back down the scree slope and crouched at the bottom, frantically trying to come up with a plan. There weren't many options, and he felt suddenly stupid and unprepared. He'd hurried through the portal without much thought of what he was going to find, other than Heather. And now his only real option was to do some serious magic, and that took time.
With a sigh he looked around for a flat piece of ground to make a circle. At home he wouldn't have bothered with a circle for what he was going to do. But here, he couldn't shape a spell and protect himself from whatever might come looking for him as soon as they smelled the magic.
Scraping a fairly round circle in the orangy-green sand with the toe of his shoe, he sat down in the center and, with a little shove of power, closed it behind himself. Tension he hadn't realized he'd been carrying left him when the magic worked just as it did back in the real world. He'd hoped it would work when he stepped through the portal, and had been pretty sure it did when he'd seen Heather's protective circle. But until he felt the snap of his circle closing he'd not been one hundred percent sure.
Now, he just had to create something he could use to defeat the gargoyle things, and hope the gris-gris and his own sense of direction would get them back to the portal.
“I love you son,” his dad said, and Steve wanted to weep. He was panicking, despite all his training, not sure how he was going to get his dad out of the situation. Five thousand miles felt like a million and there was no way he could save his dad. He knew it really, even before Anton got himself killed.
The shot echoed round his head and his knees went from under him. Except he was already on the floor, and this wasn't real, he knew that much, at least some small part of him did. He pushed the memories away, focusing on the texture of the concrete floor under his hands. Deep breath in, deep breath out. Rough feel of the floor, smell of his own sweat, and the dry, chalky smell of the apartment underneath the fetid smell of the thing he shared the room with.
“Your resistance is remarkable,” a creaking, scraping voice said directly into his head.
Steve wanted to kill the demon so badly. He didn't really know what it was trying to achieve, what it was he was resisting, other than being forced to relive some of his worst experiences. He stood up, staggering a little as he regained his feet.
“How long can you resist?” the demon asked, and Steve thought it was genuinely interested in an answer rather than just taunting him.
“As long as it takes,” Steve replied, squaring his shoulders.
“And what will you do when your Danny comes back?” the thing asked, stepping towards him and creating a shower of sparks as it touched the circle Danny had cast. “I will gut him when he steps through. What then, human? Will you break the circle, to help him?”
Steve didn't answer. He couldn't, because he didn't know what he'd do himself. The thought of standing by and watching the demon kill Danny, and Heather, was even more horrifying than all the terrible things the creature had made him imagine already. But he also knew that if he broke the circle he'd be unleashing something on the world that Danny had done his best to contain. And that would be a betrayal of everything he and Danny stood for.
“Your feelings are your weakness,” the creature said, fixing Steve with its terrible eyeless stare. “I will feast on them before I tear your flesh from your bones.”
“And I'll make sure you choke,” Steve said, not willing to give an inch even though he could feel the demon pushing into his mind again.
The thing laughed, its pointed obsidian teeth flashing in the afternoon sun. “You are amusing, human. Perhaps I should keep you at my side when I finally ravage this world.”
Steve wanted to reply, wanted to tell the thing he was going to do everything he could to stop it, or die trying, but his mind spun away and he was in Afghanistan, choking on the dust kicked up by a medivac chopper.
Danny opened his eyes and looked down at the coins in his hand. They didn't look any different, but then he didn't expect them too. He jingled them together, gathering his thoughts, before shoving all but one of them in his pants pocket. He stood up, took in a deep breath, held it, and then blew it out. Right, time to do this thing.
Outside of the circle he'd drawn in the sand, two of the gargoyle things paced, waiting for him to let go of the power that held them at bay. He was holding two circles at the moment, not that he could really feel any strain from that, but he'd also just spent four hours casting some pretty heavy duty magic, and he was really beginning to feel it. He wondered if the creatures could tell.
He also wondered how Heather was holding up. It was possible to maintain a circle while you slept, but not if you were unconscious. She had to be getting dangerously dehydrated by now, so if they were going to escape, they needed to do it now, before either of them became too exhausted to make it back to the portal.
He locked eyes with the closest gargoyle, made sure it was watching him, and then scuffed the circle with the toe of his shoe. The power dissipated and the creature charged at him, wings flapping, teeth bared. Danny waited until it was about ten feet away before throwning the dime he'd been rolling through his fingers.
The coin hit the demon square in the face and exploded with a blast of power that made Danny's heart race with excitement. It thudded outwards, washing over him with the taste of ozone and the feel of electricity prickling his skin. The gargoyle's head smashed back against its body, its face a ruined mess, and its neck snapped. He had no idea if it was actually dead, but it dropped to the ground and didn't move, so he was taking it as a win.
The other demon that had been waiting its chance, roared and charged. He hurled another coin but the thing dodged to the side and the missile missed its head and exploded against its back legs. The gargoyle was flung to the side, squealing in pain, and Danny felt a momentary pang of empathy.
The sympathy didn't last long as the creature lurched up towards him, snapping its jagged teeth, and he jumped back. He flung a charged quarter at it and its head exploded in a spatter of blood and bone. Danny smiled in grim satisfaction, stepping over the corpse and starting towards Heather.
He'd only taken a couple of steps before the gargoyles that had been menacing his sister came roaring over the top of the scree slope. Danny didn't know if it was the noise or the magic that attracted them, and he didn't have time to care. Another quarter, thrown with the wicked spin, took the wings off of the first, and knocked the second one on its ass. Danny silently thanked his high school baseball coach as he smashed a nickel into the side of the writhing wingless gargoyle, opening it's chest and killing it where it lay.
The surviving demon shook itself and leapt at him, teeth and claws flashing in the sickly light. Danny spun away from it, feeling a claw rake a line of fire down his arm as he turned. He crashed to the ground, rolled, and kicked out as the gargoyle sprang again. His foot connected with its stomach and he flipped it over his head, using its own momentum to push it away. He twisted and threw a dime, it flashed through the air and detonated right in the demon's face. With a squealing roar the thing lurched away, thrashing on the ground until it finally gasped a ragged breath and died.
He didn't hang around to find out if the demons were all really dead. Scrambling to his feet quickly, he clambered up the scree slope, slip-sliding on the lose rocks, and headed for Heather. He crested the rise, hoping there wasn’t any more of the gargoyle demons, and found his sister watching him with an exhausted smile from inside her circle.
“Danny,” she croaked, when he got closer to her.
“Hey, sis,” he said, his own grin impossible to contain, even though his eyes were filling with tears. “Watchya doing?”
“Oh you know,” she said, nowhere near as cheerful as her words suggested. Uncrossing her legs, she scuffed her shoe through the circle to break its power.
“Jeez, Heather,” he breathed, grabbing her arms and pulling her up into a fierce hug. “You gave us a scare.”
“Me too,” she croaked, wobbling as she wrapped her arms around him. “I didn’t know if you'd find me.”
“Always. Got a gris-gris from Marie,” Danny said into her hair. “And Steve's holding the door open.”
“Steve?”
“Long story,” Danny said, pulling away from his sister, even though he wanted to keep her wrapped in his arms for ever. “And I'm surprised he's not already come through looking for us.”
“How long have I been gone?” Heather asked, looking like she almost didn't want to hear the answer.
“Three days, when I left,” Danny said, slinging an arm around his sister's waist and steering them back in the direction he'd come. “But that was nearly three days ago according to my watch.”
“Time's moving faster here,” Heather said, grabbing his arm as she stumbled on the lose rock. “I've been in that circle for three months.”
“Jesus,” Danny breathed, his chest tightening at the thought of what she'd been through.
“I guessed it was, because still being alive after three months with no water didn't make any sense.”
Cursing himself for not bringing any water with him, Danny didn't reply because what could he say? Some cop he was, mounting a rescue without thinking it through. Completely under-prepared, he'd let himself get swept along by his emotions, forgetting all the things he should have thought about before stepping through the portal.
But Heather didn't seem to mind, and that made him feel even more guilty. She was grateful he'd come, when in reality it was only luck that he hadn't ended up trapped in a circle, just like she had. Yes, he was certainly better at offensive magic than she was, always had been, but he still felt like an idiot.
The best he could do now was push on, get them back to the real world as soon as possible, and get her some medical care. She might be walking along with him fine now, but he had a feeling that once they stepped through the portal time would catch up with them, and her body was going to feel the effects of three days without water.
At least Danny hoped it was just three days. The idea of three months of dehydration suddenly catching up with her didn't bear thinking about. At least Steve would be there to help. Danny knew he should probably worry how much better the idea of his partner being there made him feel. Instead he put the thought away in the increasingly full box he'd labeled 'things I don't want to think about Steve' and concentrated on getting back.
When he could see them, he was following his own tracks, but he could also feel a tug in his chest, pulling him along when there was no other guide. It wasn't the ephemeral, faint trail the gris-gris had shown him, guiding his steps like a glow in the corner of his eye. No, this was visceral, anchored somewhere in his chest, physically guiding his body, he hoped, back to an apartment in the Upper West Side. And to Steve.
Steve was thrown back by the explosion, pain lancing through his gut, but he didn't care. The pain was right, good even, because he'd failed. Danny was dead, and he'd failed. He couldn't open his eyes, and his ears rung sharp and painful, and Steve knew he'd be deaf when it stopped. Certain he was bleeding out, he struggled to roll over and get to Danny. He needed to get to Danny.
Farooq had won in the end, and Steve wanted to kill him all over again. He wanted to wind back time and save Danny. God, it hurt. He just wanted to crawl to Danny, lie next to him, and just let it all bleed away. But he had to live, he had to look after Grace. It would kill him a little every day, but he would be there for the kid, telling her how much her Danno loved her, how much he'd wanted to live for her. That he'd tell Grace he'd swap with her dad in a heartbeat wasn't even something he had to think about, if they could find some magic to make it happen.
He could feel tears running down his face and wondered if there was a spell for raising the dead. Because if there was, he'd use it, consequences be damned. A tiny part of his mind was screaming this wasn't right, Danny wasn't dead, but he'd seen it. Felt it.
He had to move, call for help. Why wasn't anyone coming? Was there another bomb? That made sense. He lay on the dusty road and hoped his team would come get him before he died. Was Danny okay? He'd kill him if he died. But Danny wasn't in Afghanistan. He was back in Hawaii, and he'd been blown up. Why wasn't Steve there.
A voice in his head that sounded a lot like his dad was shouting 'Get up, son. You need to help Danny.' Steve rolled, pushing away the fog in his mind, seeing the concrete floor of the Upper West side apartment under his face. Reality flooded back, the pain he'd been feeling pushed away by a rush of adrenalin. He'd been so close to giving in, so close to letting Danny down.
The demon had turned away from him, looking towards the portal, and Steve knew what was happening. It had lost control of him, focusing instead on what was happening on the other side of the portal. He had to do something to save his partner - he couldn't not - regardless of the warning Danny had given him. He'd watched Danny die more times than he could remember and he wasn't going to let it happen again. Unsure if this was even real but he knew he couldn't not help.
Danny stepped into the circle, seemingly having appeared out of thin air. Springing to his feet, pulling his K-bar from the sheath in his boot, Steve roared as he charged at the demon. Its eyeless stare flicked back to him, and away from Danny, who had scuttled back through the tear in reality. Steve prayed it wasn't a delusion spun by the demon, to make him break the circle, as he leapt.
Feeling a prickle on his skin, a burning crawl over his whole body, Steve passed through Danny's circle of power and plunged his knife into the demon's throat. The creature flailed, one of its arms thrashing into Steve and knocking the air out of him. But he held on, driving the knife in harder, twisting it into the black, scaled skin. The demon screamed, the sound raising goosebumps on Steve's skin and rattling his bones. He wanted to drop the knife and put his hands over his ears, but something was telling him to hang on, to push with body and mind, to drive it into the thing.
It twisted, still screaming, thrashing and falling to the ground. It rolled over Steve, making his ribs groan under its weight. And still he held the knife, driving it in further, his hands slipping on the hilt, as the creature's blood covered his hands. Pain lanced through his head, a howling stab of hurt from the demon, as it tried to mentally push him off. He thought he might be screaming, but he couldn't tell. Everything hurt, pain, more than he'd ever felt before, gouging at him, ripping him, body and mind. And he just wanted it stop, but he had to save Danny. He cried out, begging someone to help him.
He felt power surge through him; the sound of blowing conch shells, the scent of rum, the glide of fish swimming past him, and his mind cleared. Steve's grip tightened and he pushed the knife in deeper, shoving the power that washed through his mind out, focusing it on the blade. He wasn't sure he really believed in the god Agwe, that Marie said protected him, but he sent out thanks to whatever was lending him power and pushed it like a lance into the demon.
The demon gasped, spasmed, and then, with a blast of energy that burned across Steve's skin, lay still. Steve closed his eyes, the after images of the energy crawling like green worms across the back of his eyelids. The silence was total after the chaos of the past few seconds and Steve thought he might have gone deaf until, Danny spoke.
“Babe, what did you do?”
Chapter Six