When Sam woke, every part of him hurt to move.
He hurt even when he tried to open his eyes and so he did so gingerly, blinking against the harsh fluorescent light above him.
“Doctor?” someone said. Sam didn’t recognize the voice, but a lot seemed out of place. The last thing he remembered was falling on the street after being consumed by the green fire.
“Please go get his mother,” a man’s voice said. Sam had the sudden, irrational thought that the voice belonged to his dad. The feeling was so powerful, he almost bolted up before a wicked pain in his arm and his chest kept him on his back.
“Where am I?” Sam croaked. He realized his mouth was drier than a desert in summer and his lips as cracked as the ground.
“Just take it easy, Sam,” the man said. Sam, blinking through the harsh light, recognized the white coat and the sterile hospital room, a single sink in the corner, a chair with a blanket and book on the table, an empty glass of water. “The nurse has gone to fetch your mom. She should explain.”
“Explain what? What’s happened to me?”
“Son, it’s going to be all right,” another man said, moving into Sam’s view on the opposite side of the bed. He wore a plain, dark blue suit with a tiny pin on his lapel.
The pin.
Something seemed strangely familiar about the pin, and that’s when Sam realized it was an eagle clutching a bunch of arrows. The symbol of the United States of America.
The man bent in closer and grabbed Sam’s left arm hard.
“Don’t have much time, son. I’m Colonel Grady with NADR. North American Demon Resistance. You need to talk to me right now. We need your help.”
Demon resistance? Sam thought. What?
Something about the man bothered Sam. Maybe it was too much aftershave, or how tense he seemed. Or maybe it was something intangible, something underneath his perfectly pressed suit; something he was hiding. Whatever it was, Sam decided he wanted nothing of whatever the man was selling.
In a burst of strength, he thrashed in bed, ignoring the tubes hooked to him, ignoring the straps holding him down. He pulled at the restraints with all his might, determined to sit up, when the doctor was suddenly on top of him, pinning him down.
“Nurse! Nurse!” the doctor called.
Footsteps echoed in the hallway outside, rushing to the call. Colonel Grady leaned in closer as the doctor shot him a sharp look.
“Sam, listen to me. You need to tell me what you know about . . . the event. It’s imperative that you tell me now. I can make it really hard on your mom if you don’t tell me what you know right now.” He squeezed Sam’s arm even harder. “I promise you that.”
But Sam wasn’t paying attention to Colonel Grady, or anything else for that matter. Neither the man’s words nor that the doctor was trying to pin him down, hardly registered.
Because everything seemed wrong.
Why do I feel so . . . off? Why do I feel so weak? Sam wondered. Did the fire really do something to me like I saw happen to the other people?
The other people.
His mind filled with images of their bodies, their screams. He recalled only lying on the asphalt for a few moments before blacking out, but he also remembered everything he saw in the flames—the little figures tearing bodies apart, setting people on fire.
He wanted to throw up.
A nurse hovered over him, a syringe poised to deliver a sedative. With one incredible act of strength, he ripped his right arm free and brought it up to ward off the needle.
Only the arm wasn’t his arm.
Instead of the thirteen-year-old arm he’d thrown so many baseballs with—the one he’d broken when he’d fallen out of the tree in the park; the one which became useless because he’d opened the box—a hideous arm of black and green scales which reflected gold and silver in the fluorescent light of his hospital room greeted him. What’s more, instead of five fingers, he flexed only four, each one ending in a wicked talon.
The fight left him as he stared at his arm, realizing in the same breath that his right eye worked again too. Although it was blurry and filled with a greenish hue, he could see.
In that moment, he remembered everything, like the flash from a camera: the explosion in the dining room of the apartment when he opened the box with the gem his dad had found in the cave, the blindness in his right eye and more, the loss of the use of the right side of his body…and then the trip to the doctor on that hot, July afternoon.
Sam hardly felt the prick of the needle as more nurses rushed into the room, pressing down on him, fixing his restraints.
Even with his arm at his side again, he couldn’t dispel the image from his mind—the black and green scales, the claws.
“What happened to me?”
“Rest right now, Sam. You’ve been through quite an ordeal, and you need to rest,” the doctor said. Sam turned to face him. He looked kindly enough. Older, with close-cropped brown hair, the beginnings of age starting to show in the gray over his ears. For a moment, it struck Sam how much the doctor did look like his father.
“You’re going to tell me what you know, son,” Grady said as he pushed the doctor aside to get almost nose to nose with Sam. “I promise you.”
With the help of several nurses, the doctor finally managed to pull Grady away.
“Where’s Sam? He’s awake?” Sam’s mother yelled as she barged into the room. More nurses grabbed her even as Sam’s eyelids began to droop.
“Mom? Mom!”
Sam tried to reach up again, to break from his restraints, but the fight in him faded as the drugs worked their magic, closing his eyes, relaxing every muscle.
The last thing he remembered before drifting off to sleep was the doctor telling his mother she could speak to him as soon as he woke up, but after being in a coma for so long he needed to rest.
The word rattled around in his head as sleep overtook him.
Coma.
***
Colonel Grady didn’t want to leave the hospital room, but there was no telling how long Sam might sleep under the effects of the sedative. He shook his head.
Stupid doctors, stupid hospital, he fumed. All of them. Do they not know what’s at stake here?
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he absentmindedly pulled it out, glancing at the screen.
Another message from Rogers.
Probably another problem to add to my never-ending list of problems.
“Take care of it yourself,” he whispered, pocketing the phone. Despite his annoyance with the message, he was relieved that their makeshift messaging service still worked.
He stomped out through the front door of the hospital, his polished dress shoes clacking on the tiles. Even without looking at the dozens in the waiting room, he was sure most of them were there because of demon attacks.
“It’s going to get worse until we can find out something to stop them,” he whispered. “And that starts with Sam.”
Grady stepped into the black SUV, one which had been specially outfitted to block the electromagnetic waves still pulsing around the planet and shut the door behind him. The driver immediately pulled out into traffic, always an interesting proposition as the streets were now flooded with the strange vehicles the demons drove: carriages led by horse like beasts with six legs; huge beetles with cars somehow mounted on the shell; mismatched car parts which resembled something put together by a third grader; and others loping, flying, or stumbling by that Grady couldn’t even describe. And meandering through them all? A few normal cars as well, older models which didn’t have the electronics of today’s more modern cars.
It was blind luck Grady had even found out about Sam. After the fire consumed the planet, all hell broke loose. Literally. Well, at least that was the initial reaction by most people, driven by religious zealotry. Unfortunately, some like Grady soon realized something; demons represented another species. It wasn’t a biblical event. It was an invasion.
Six months, he thought. Six months for everything to settle down enough to launch our offensive.
Their first response, a direct attack by military forces, had failed miserably. The demons simply overpowered human weapons. Grady still stumbled on the word, but their magic easily disabled vehicles, guns, and electronics. In just a matter of months, he and his agents were blind and cutoff in New York. The internet stopped working, satellites became floating junk, swarms of creatures ripped cellular towers apart, not to mention the physical damage the fire itself left behind. Grady figured the fire acted like an electromagnetic wave, damaging electronics haphazardly but not destroying them. Like his phone. The fire made all electronics woefully unreliable. Cars would sometimes start and run for a while. Radio broadcasts might work for a short time before degenerating into static. Televisions would turn on and off as if possessed. And the worst part? It kept happening. The fire came and went, but its aftereffects lingered, like science and magic didn’t quite mix.
Two years after The Reckoning and the world still floundered in chaos. Largely cut-off from his chain-of-command, Grady had taken matters into his own hands. Six months after the initial event, he organized NADR—the North American Demon Resistance—and a year after, his agents infiltrated demon groups and forged relationships. That’s when Grady started sending his agents into the hospitals with the hopes that he could draw information out of demon victims. To Grady, this was a war of information. The more he had, the more he might coordinate with other pockets of resistance.
Then he heard about Sam.
The hospital had kept the boy’s condition a secret. Only a few people even knew about the demon boy, and those who did understood the ramifications if anyone found out—people would try to kill Sam. The first human-demon. The media would mob the hospital, making it impossible to work and sooner or later, when the TV worked or when a radio broadcast got through, people would find out. . . and they would come for Sam. But for some reason, the hospital didn’t just turn the boy away either. Grady suspected the reason the hospital treated Sam had something to do with the family. With what Janet had in the bank, she couldn’t afford to pay the exorbitant medical bills, especially without insurance. So, he dug. Dug into the hospital. The doctor. The nurses. Everything and everyone. And eventually he and his agents found what they needed—the malpractice suit involving her husband’s unexplained death, carefully packaged up, all neat and tidy, hidden from prying eyes.
Except his.
The driver slammed on the brakes as a host of demon vehicles charged out of the alleyway, apparently racing each other down the busy, littered New York streets. They hooted and hollered, some shooting bolts of lightning at the others. Fireballs rocketed into the sky, errantly hitting the side of a building and blowing debris to the street below.
“Complete and utter chaos. You’d think these demons would understand the cities they seem to enjoy so much aren’t going to stay in one piece much longer if they keep this up.”
“Excuse me, sir?” the driver asked.
“Never mind. Just talking out loud.”
The demons hadn’t only moved in, they’d taken ownership. What were once the five boroughs in New York became a dozen smaller “states” all ruled by a different demon lord who imposed his own rules on the human inhabitants. Grady heard of one state, Burjzinka, where humans couldn’t wear clothes. And Central Park? He shook his head. A giant bazaar jam-packed with tents and multicolored shacks all stacked on top of one another.
The chaos wasn’t just limited to New York either. After the world began to connect again, after they’d figured out how to work around the intermittent electrical issues, stories came out of everywhere. Asia. Europe. Africa. South America. All the same things. Grady concocted a theory—the fire wasn’t only about “cleansing,” as the demons put it. It represented a means of transportation as well, like riding the bus. The demons simply got off where they wanted to around the planet.
Grady stared at the file folder in the seat next to him and flipped it open. There, pinned to the inside, was the old parchment next to a picture of Sam from his seventh-grade yearbook and one of him lying in the hospital.
How many agents did I lose trying to get that? he wondered, fingering the old scrap of paper. But he knew a prophecy when he saw one.
Created from demon fire, the Azari shall wield power untold,
Commanding the magic through which the universe does fold,
To undo everything that has been wrought,
To free or subjugate all with guidance not.
He flipped the next page and read the first note.
Brought into the hospital by his mother. Parts of him transformed after she said the fire passed.
“Brought in the day of the fire,” Grady said to himself.
Created from demon fire.
Maybe he’s this Azari this prophecy mentions, he thought. And if that’s the case, then he might be the weapon we need to turn the tide of this war.
“I am going to get you to help us, Sam,” he said, staring at the boy’s picture. “If it’s the last thing I do.”