last of the Reapers vanished into the spirit bottles.
That just left Sariel, Marinette Bois Sech and the Watchers. A sorcerer with a vendetta, a bat-shit crazy Loa and four high-ranking fallen angels with another Watcher fighting his way between worlds.
Marinette’s spirit grew more solid as the flames of the bonfire rose. Sariel was working his magic, opening the gateway to Hell. We were fighting as hard as we could, and losing. The fifth Watcher struggled through the ether to get to the opening between our world and his. We had seconds left if we were going to stop a cataclysm.
Without any kind of signal, we charged at Sariel and his Watchers, determined to go down fighting rather than letting him destroy Charleston.
Sariel’s magic was tied up in his working to open that portal and bring the fifth Watcher through. He didn’t dare break away to fight us. He needed his Watchers to wreak vengeance, but until the fifth one joined them, they didn’t have a starting line-up. And we gave them no choice except to fight or let us cut them down where they stood.
The Watchers chose to fight.
“Leave Sariel to me!” Sorren snarled.
“Now where would the fun be in that?” a voice questioned from the darkness behind the fire. Archibald Donnelly, necromancer extraordinaire, emerged from the shadows wearing a safari outfit complete with pith helmet. Behind him were Caliel and Father Anne, as well as Mrs. Teller and Niella. They all looked worse for wear, skin streaked with dirt and blood, but they had made it in time, and they looked mad as hell.
Donnelly raised a churchwarden pipe, holding the pipe bowl in his palm and pointing the stem directly at the portal. The Watcher was fully framed in the ragged opening of the rift between worlds, about to step through the doorway. “Encumber!” Donnelly thundered, and the Watcher receded from the opening, as if he had been pushed far back a long corridor.
“Don’t you know better than to muck around in the Netherworld when there’s a necromancer around?” he chided Sariel. He turned to Sorren. “I’ll hold the gate. You deal with that sorry son of a bitch.”
Chuck was already firing at the Watchers. He let out a string of curses, lobbed an EMF grenade, then took careful aim. At the instant the grenade exploded in a burst of electromagnetic energy and cold light, Chuck squeezed the trigger again. Watcher One screamed in rage and pain as the modified bullet tore into his shoulder.
Lucinda and Caliel joined forces and took on Marinette Bois Sech. The dangerous Loa’s figure had grown nearly solid enough to step out of the fire like a god made flesh. Lucinda never stopped chanting and singing, even when she loosed a torrent of green fire from the tip of her walking stick, which held the remembered power of all the mambos and houngans who had owned it across the generations. Lucinda’s fire hit the apparition square in the neck and face. The green fire met with Marinette’s own flames, red as hell. Fire vied with fire, a test of wills, but for the moment, it halted Marinette’s advance.
The night smelled of blood and otherworldly ichor, salt marsh and sweat. I caught a whiff of tobacco and the smell of rum. Over to one side, Daniel’s harpoon gun sank its silver-tipped spear right through Watcher Two’s chest. Enraged, the Watcher reached down and yanked the spear back out, hurling it back at Daniel so fast that Daniel barely saw it coming. The harpoon sliced deep into Daniel’s thigh and he cried out.
Father Anne came at Watcher Two from behind, with a pearl-handled, thin-bladed knife that had its own brand of nasty magic. She stabbed the blade through the Watcher’s neck so that the point came out the other side, and then pulled fast and strong, slitting his throat from the inside out. Father Anne doesn’t mess around. Watcher Two sank to the ground but instead of disappearing, his whole body trembled and then he rose, ready to fight. It was going to take more than a slit throat to put a Watcher down. That was a very bad sign.
I was busy with Watcher Three, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Mrs. Teller and Niella had retreated to the doorway of the nearby gift shop, where they crouched over the dim flame of a candle. I figured they were casting some kind of Hoodoo protection spell, and I just hoped they’d