Another explosion rocked the city, shaking the walls and rattling the few dishes in the cupboard.

Tallis walked to the hidden cupboard and slapped it open. The panel fell down with a creek and he pocketed as many stones as he could, focusing on the dangerous stuff. He turned to his father and held out his hand. “Dad, I’m going to need my gun.”

“Not going to happen.”

He knocked at the wall on the other side of the hidden panel. It sounded thin and felt flimsy. He held a redstone up to the surface. “If you won’t let me through I’ll have to make my own door. I’m helping the people here. And you can’t stop me.”

A moment of grim silence hung in the room, thick enough to walk across. A keening wail cut the air.

The devil had come to call.

“Gun,” he said, holding out his hand again. “I’m going to need it.”

Norman shook his head.

A distant scream rolled in the distance.

“If that’s the way it’s going to be,” said Tallis. “Then I’m sorry about your wall. When this is over I’m sure I can figure out how to use the greenstone you have here to fix it.” He breathed a careful measure of power into the stone and it warmed in his hand. A thin curl of smoke rolled up from its surface.

“Wait,” said Norman. He held out Tallis’ pistol and moved away from the door. “Go. Just promise you’ll come back, okay?”

He took the gun and opened the door. “I will. I’ll see you soon.”

Edward moved to follow him.

Tallis turned and put a hand on his father’s shoulder. “You’d better stay here, dad.”

“If you’re going then so am I.”

“This fight is too much for you. What are you going to do?”

“Me? What are you going to do? You’re half dead.”

“Fine.”

Another wail split the air and a pair of dark wings flitted in front of the sun.

Tallis looked down at the gun in his hand. “There wouldn’t happen to be a gunsmith handy would there? We might need something with a little more heft to it.”

Ed nodded and led the way down the street. Something heavy thudded to the earth behind them. The rotten smell of wet decay rolled over them and the Devil snorted. Tallis crushed the redstone in his fist and threw a sheet of flame at the monster. It staggered back with a snarl. Thick, black smoke rose from its fur and the stench of burnt hair did nothing to improve it’s aroma.

Tallis gagged.

He gave his father a gentle shove forward. “Go. I’ll catch up.” He raised his gun, put three bullets into the demon and took off down the street, running away from Edward. The Devil growled and charged after him. Fear gave his feet wings and he ran harder than he ever had before in his life. He barreled around a corner and ran headlong into a knot of Cold Iron Officers. They were all leaned up against buildings and lamp posts, chatting idly and smoking cigarettes.

The lead detective held out a hand towards him. “Slow down, buddy. Got some questions for you.”

Tallis paid the officers no mind and barreled forward. The demon came after him.

Weapons flew from the holsters and rounds rattled into chambers. “He’s a Faerunner,” shouted the lead detective. “Shoot him!”

Tallis shot first. A bullet slammed through the detective’s knee and a nexus of red light flared around him. He fell down with a curse. Tallis ran through the clump of officers, sprinting for an alley down the street. At the very least it would give him a little cover.

The monster barreled into the detectives and knocked them aside with a swipe of its claws. The men were thrown into the air, screaming and came down with a series of thuds and sharp crunches. They opened fire on the demon. It stopped, torn between chasing down its prey and fending off its attackers. Something dark and evil glinted in its eyes.

The beast chose bloodshed.

Tallis looked away and dove into the alley. He skidded to a stop and ducked behind an empty carriage. Taking a few moments to catch his breath, he fed a few rounds into the pistol. Gunshots roared down the street behind him. The Devil would be busy for a while.

He slipped the gun into its holster and walked to the end of the alley. It opened into a spacious courtyard with low benches and thin bristly plants. A trio of agents were standing over a dozen kneeling people, aiming rifles at them.

A woman with captain’s bars on her shoulders looked at him and raised an overly long pistol in his direction. “On your knees.” she barked.

He scanned the courtyard. There were a few battered doors behind the detectives but no real way out. Not unless he could run past the captain without getting shot, and something told him she wouldn’t miss.

The captain pulled back the hammer on her gun. “I’m not asking a second time.”

A final shot and a scream rang up the alley. Tallis got to his knees and did his best to fish another stone out of his pocket.

“Hands where I can see them,” the captain snapped.

“Sure,” he said, pouring as much energy as he could into the gem. “No problem.” He raised his hands and tossed the stone towards the detective. A jagged diamond bounced across the tiles towards her and burst into a miniature sun. Tallis screwed his eyes shut tight. He eased them open, blinking the spots away. The agents were blind. He scrambled to his feet and slapped the captain’s gun aside.

He racked the slide on his pistol and pushed the barrel into the woman’s forehead. “You can go ahead and drop the gun.”

She didn’t. Instead she hammered a knee into his groin. He dubbed over in pain. Something hard came down on his cheek. A starburst of blinding white pain seared across his face. A fist whooshed through the air above his head. He dropped his shoulder and charged forward, driving into the captain and sending them both crashing to the ground. The other two detectives rushed in, blinking tears from their eyes. The captain drove a fist into Tallis’ ribs and rolled him away. She came up on top and brought the butt of her pistol down on his forehead.

The world went grey and hazy around the edges.

The captain stood, keeping her pistol trained on him. “Chain this one up, boys. Or shoot him. See if I care.”

A low growl answered her and a set of ragged claws swept down, knocking her off her feet and sending her flying into the wall across the square. The other agents backed up fumbling to cock their weapons. The devil lashed out and took the first agent's left arm clean off. The second one fired his weapon. The devil fell to one knee.

Tallis shuffled away from the chaos and scrambled to his feet. He waved to the people still kneeling in the square. “Get out of here! Go!”

They rushed to their feet and poured towards the doors the agents had been blocking. Tallis gave the demon a few bullets for good measure and collected the dying agent’s rifle. He followed the crowd and ran through one of the doors. He found himself behind the counter in a general store. Reaching into a glass fronted cabinet on his left, he helped himself to a new box of ammunition and vaulted over the counter.

The devil caught him by the collar.

Metal groaned as the scales in his vest pulled taught. His feet came out from under him and the devil slammed him to the ground. The air left his lungs and he rolled back and forth weakly, struggling to pull in a breath. The devil reared up over him, savouring the moment. Several smoking holes had been punched through its stomach, the left half of its face was a gore soaked ruin and its right arm hung limp, but it just would not stop. Claws whistled down, slicing the air. Tallis jerked to the left. A shower of dust and dirt rained down on him. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, still struggling to find a breath of air. The devil drove a foot into his gut. He managed to bring his gun up and squeezed the trigger. The glass cabinet behind the demon shattered.

It snarled and raised its claws, ready to finish him. He fired again. The demon staggered back. Tallis finally found his breath and stood on shaking legs. He steadied his aim and sneered at the monster. He fired again and the right side of the creature's face was blasted apart. He worked the bolt on his new rifle, chambering a fresh round and looked down at the gun. “You and I are going to get along just fine, I think.”

He gave the pinewatcher’s corpse a kick and left through the front of the shop. The door led to a wider thoroughfare that was completely engulfed in chaos. A small team of Cold Iron agents stood behind a pair of overturned carriages, exchanging shots with a pair of Fae who were hiding behind a stack of crates. Innocent people were caught in the middle, running in all directions. The Faerunners fell back and another Eastling Devil swooped down, spearing an older gentleman with the claws on its feet. It looked down at the dying man like it had stepped in manure and took off after the runners, the agents followed it.

Tallis stepped out into the raging torrent of humanity. He did what he could to direct the stampede. To calm the rush of people. To direct the flow. Nothing helped. He didn’t have the strength to cut above the chaos. A raven fluttered down next to him and with a flash of violet light it shifted into his friend Callan.

The Fae patted him on the shoulder. “Let me try,” he said with a smile. “I think I may have a better voice for it.”

The Fae climbed on top of one of the overturned carriages and shouted out above the chaos, directing people to a chappel one block away. With the mass of frightened people corralled for now, Callan jumped down from the carriage. “I’m hoping you have a better picture of what’s going on than I do.“

“I really, really, wish I did. I just woke up more or less. The last demon I fought put me down for a couple days.”

Callan kicked at a stray shotgun shell on the ground with a growl. “Damn. The whole city is a mess. There’s battle everywhere we go and demons behind every other corner. Come on. I’ll take you to the others. By some small miracle we managed to take over a Cold Iron office and it seems relatively safe for now.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pair of feathers bound in twine. “The best way to get there is from the air.”

Tallis smiled as he tucked the focus into his breast pocket. He thought he’d never see it again.

Channeling his will through the focus item, he left his human shape behind and beat his wings, soaring above the city skyline. From up here everything looked worse than it had from the ground. Down in the streets he had at least been able to hang on to the lie that the rest of the city was fine, that this was a small problem, that this was something they could fight. From up here, he could see that the city was burning. The city center was a solid wall of flames, a hundred agents swarmed the street, and every now and then he caught the grim shape of a Pine Barren Devil slaughtering its way through the crowd. 

Callan soared past him and led him to a small and stout building surrounded by overturned carts, upended carriages and ramshackle barricades. He tucked his wings and dove, falling to the ground and letting go of his spell just before the impact. Tallis followed him down, circling and drifting much more carefully to the earth.  

He touched down in the open square between the barricades and shifted back to his normal form. Everything was quiet here. The uncomfortable kind of quiet. The anxious quiet. It was the kind of grim silence that only comes from a group of people sitting and waiting for bad news. Someone on the roof of the building let out a sharp whistle and Callan waved him inside.

“We’ve been here for less than a day,” he said. “So I still feel like we aren’t playing with a full deck. I’d prefer to have a better picture of what’s going on. It looks like most of the officers in the whole damn country have shown up here. There’s pockets of Faerunners scattered everywhere but no way to get word to them. If we could present a united front, we might have a chance but as it is, we’re getting picked off by ones and twos.”

The inside of the station felt familiar, like the whole of Cold Iron had used the same blueprints for their offices. There was a short entry way, all of the furniture here had been piled into a makeshift barricade and two young Changelings stood guard behind it, holding shotguns. Beyond that the main room had been mostly emptied. Desks and chairs had been hacked to kindling, a fire pit had been blasted into the floor and Aragam stood next to it, turning a roast of meat on a spit. The air was hazy and choked with smoke. All of the windows had been opened and a hole had been blown through the ceiling but it wasn’t quite enough to clear the smoke.

Someone passed him a waterskin and Aragam carved him a slice of the slice of the roast. “Good to see you, Tallis,” he said. “I’d been starting to think you were dead. Best eat up while you can, yeah? Could be a long time before we get a proper meal.”

“Thanks,” said Tallis. The meat was plain and a little bland but it did the job. Some of the exhaustion from his fight leached out of him and he felt refreshed by the time he was finished. “Callan gave me the rundown of what’s been going on. It seems like there isn’t much hope.”

Aragam cut a portion for himself and sat on the floor next to Tallis. “There is always hope, Tallis. Sometimes it’s just harder to find.”

“I’m just not sure what we can do. There must be a hundred agents out there, and those demons. You know how hard they are to kill.”

“So just because things are hard we should give up?” said Aragam. “We’ll just let people die? I mean if that’s what you want that’s fine, okay. We can let you go, and you can do whatever you want.”

Tallis grit his teeth and blew out a frustrated huff. “No. That’s not what I want.”

Aragam stood with a shrug. “Then we fight.”

Valerie stepped into the main room, coming from one of the offices at the back of the room and wiping her hands on a red stained rag. “I like that plan,” she said. “It’s simple.”

“We don’t have anywhere close to the numbers we’d need to win this in a straight up fight,” said Callan. “This isn’t going to be as simple as throwing the doors open and charging the enemy.”

“I’m not sure,” said Valerie. “Have you been to see Setia in the armoury downstairs yet? We have a lot of guns.”

“I don’t know if more guns is the solution,” said Aragam.

Tallis stood and ambled towards the front of the room. “Well, they couldn’t hurt.” He trotted down the stairs and pushed the door to the armoury open. Setia was behind the counter, carefully disassembling a rifle.

“Talis,” she said, not looking up from her work. “I thought you died.”

“I did.” He shrugged.

She set the gun down and frowned at him.

“I got better.”

“Okay. We’ll have to unpack that one later. Anything I can get you?”

He put his bloodstained rifle on the counter. “I’m looking to trade up. Do you have anything that will put a Pinewatcher down?”

“Yes. Are they guns that you can use? No.”

“I’m a much better shot now! Show me what you have.”

She rolled her eyes and opened a cabinet behind the counter. “We have a couple of options.” She put a long thin rifle with a heavy looking barrel on the counter. “A Point’s rifle might do the job. Made for hunting big game. Aragam uses the shorter carbine model. Not for you.”

“Why not?” He took the rifle off the counter and peered down the sights. “Seems to work well enough for him.”

She leaned over the counter and took the gun away from him. “And it only has one shot. Knowing you, you’ll miss, and get killed before you’ve reloaded.” She took another gun from the cabinet, and laid it next to the Point’s rifle. “All of our options are big bore, low capacity, buffalo rifles. The recoil alone would set you on your ass.”

“What about one of those?” He pointed to a glass fronted case behind her.

She turned and shook her head. “Seriously? You even know how to work one of these?” She turned and set a crossbow on the counter next to the rifles.

He took the weapon and plucked the string. “How hard could it be?”

Setia passed him a quiver full of rowan wood bolts. “Very.”

He loaded one of the bolts and hauled on the lever that cranked the string back. “I think this’ll work. You up for a little fun? We have demons to slay.”

He turned to leave but she leaned over the counter and caught him by the sleeve. “Wait,” she said. “You should take these.” She put his Faemetal bracers, leather half chaps, and white hat on the counter. “I found time to lay a few spells on them while you were away. Might stop you from getting killed this time.”

“Thanks. Hopefully I won’t need them.”