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When people hear of magic, the first image is usually bangs, flashes, fireworks, frogs into princes and princes into frogs.
The real deal is a bit less glamorous – lots of moldy books, lots of paperwork, lots of meditation. It was the latter part Dr Strange was currently trying to catch up on.
Meditation. Control the mind. Send yourself into a state of perfect control over mind and body. Always said, almost never achieved.
This time he was determined to get in the whole prescribed time in. Done everything right, arranged proper calm lighting, took a cleansing bath, dressed in loose white clothes, locked the door and set the wards in ready mode.
He had just sat down when the cell phone rang.
Strange had to fight the temptation to just hex the shrieking thing and go on with his schedule. Unfortunately, not an option – not in his old career, not in his new one. Plus, the meditation-calm had already been shattered.
If it turns out to be a telemarketer I’m gonna turn him into a bullfrog.
“Who’s this?” that came out a bit too much as a growl for the calm and in control persona he liked to project.
For a moment, there was no reply.
“Who is this?” he was about to hang up when he realized that whoever was on the other end was trying to talk. “Speak up, I can’t hear you.”
“Hi, Strange” The voice was almost too whispery to be recognized. Almost.
“Loki? What-“
“I’m a couple of streets down from your place. Could use some help…” most of the words were too slurred to make out.
Strange would have liked to believe the kid was just drunk, but he had heard the same fading tones from too many patients during his time in the ER.
“Are you hurt?”
“Not…not sure…Hunting.”
Strange was already out of the door and rushing to the elevator.
“Hunting? You were hunting something?”
“No…”
“Something hunting you?”
No reply.
“Loki, where are you? Which street? Give me a name!”
“Street?”
“It should be on a signboard somewhere, look around!”
Loki murmured something that did sound like the name of a nearby store. Strange hoped he had heard it right. Going by the kid’s tone, there wasn’t any time to be lost. Especially if something was after him.
…………………………..
The place was deserted – as it would be, past midnight. No one around – no questionably sane Norse gods, no monsters that could hunt said Norse gods.
“Loki?”
No reply. He had fallen silent by the time Strange had got his car started and out of the garage. Unconscious? Or did whatever it was find him?
“Loki, where are you?”
No help from that quarters. Strange glanced around. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing out of place…Except a white car parked askew. The sorcerer frowned. Something off about it. Magic. Now, focusing on the car, he could see the multitude of wards surrounding it. The kid had apparently cast all the protective spells he could.
“It’s really got you spooked, eh?”
Strange stepped closer. All the wards he could see had been cast to keep out non-human entities. He should be able to breach them without much risk. Hopefully.
The Wards parted readily to let him through. Loki must have felt pretty sure he would come find him.
“Loki?” he opened the car door tentatively, a defense spell held at the ready just in case whatever was after Loki had finally caught up. “Loki!”
The kid was slumped against the steering wheel, his face and torso soaked in blood. His dark hair was matted to his head with blood. Deep slash wounds down his arms – defense wounds. The dark green coat didn’t show blood well, but it was easy enough to see it was drenched.
“What the hell got you, kid?” Strange’s medical training took over, assessing Loki’s wounds, even as his sorcerer’s senses scanned the area for possible threats.
“Demon” Loki murmured. “Shaherung.”
Shaherung? Strange hoped he had heard wrong – but probably not. There were not many things out there that could mess up the god of magic this badly. And if it was a shaherung – a shadow demon – after Loki, remaining out here was literal suicide.
“Come on, let’s get you behind some real wards.”
Not really medically sound, given he wasn’t sure there weren’t internal injuries, but given the circumstances, it was acceptable risk. Loki’s skin was cold, waxy. Pulse slow and slowing further. Too much blood loss.
The Asgardian was just conscious enough to hold on to Strange as the latter helped him out of the car. “Help…”
“I will. Can’t do healing spells on the run, let’s first get back to home base.”
Not just about doing it on the run. Healing spells were very complicated magic, one that, despite his previous vocation, Strange was not particularly sure of even now. if he were to have a chance of healing injuries this bad, he would need to be back in his sanctum, his center of power.
“Scared…”
“Don’t be. I’m here now.”
Loki was slender, but he had too much muscle on him to be lightweight. Strange glanced around for the brief moment they were between the cars.
Nothing swooping down on them. not yet., anyway. But he could feel something advancing, like the soldier who knows that the laser scope of a sniper has made a target on his head an instant before the bullet follows.
Something had Loki – now had both of them – locked in its target.
…………………
“I hate mixing magic and medicine” Strange grumbled.
Loki chuckled rather weakly. They had gotten back to Strange’s apartment without further incident. Now the worst of Loki’s injuries had been patched up and he was slightly more alert and aware. But not all the way back yet. Not enough to interrogate.
Not for the first time, Strange wished that Loki didn’t look so young. It was absurd, the guy was more than a millennia old, he shouldn’t look like he wasn’t yet old enough to shave. Then again, if you translated Asgardian age to human, Loki was not yet of legal drinking age…
Strange sighed in exasperation. Loki looked way too pale and vulnerable, his face as white as the bedspread on which he lay.
The human sorcerer found himself wishing that the shadow demon would catch up, after all. He wanted to get his hands on that bastard. It had nearly killed Loki, and probably would have killed him if Strange had been a bit late.
The kid’s wounds were nasty enough. Defense wounds that nearly took his forearm off, a deep scratch across his throat, claw wounds on his chest as if whatever it was had tried to claw his heart out, a head injury which was probably the result of being tossed around like a ragdoll. Strange had just managed to stop the bleeding.
“Drink this” he held a vial to Loki’s lips. The kid looked at him dazedly.
“Drink” Strange insisted “ A potion. It’s not like we can arrange a blood transfusion here.”
Loki obeyed. Strange watched anxiously as some color returned to the kid’s face.
“What was in that?” Loki asked, sitting up.
Strange shrugged. “You really don’t want the recipe – not if you need to keep it down.”
“Ugh. So as nasty as it tasted.”
It got you back to consciousness, at least, don’t diss it.
Loki glanced around, as if just realizing where he was. “Your apartment?”
“Yeah.” He had briefly considered heading to the Avengers Tower, but it was too far away – he hadn’t been sure Loki could last that long.
“How are the wards around?”
“Strong enough to fry your big sis if she comes calling again.”
After their latest encounter with Hela, all the Avengers had upgraded their security arrangements.
Loki didn’t smile. “Hope that’ll be enough.”
Strange frowned. “Explanation time. What happened?”
The trickster sighed. “Really long story.”
“Give me the cliffs notes version.”
“We were exploring. Ran into a prison vault for big bads.”
“We?” Strange groaned. “Don’t tell me you mean Tony.”
“Yeah. Tony.”
“Great. And where is he now?”
“China.”
Strange blinked, taking a hurried look at the potion vial’s label.
Loki laughed. “Nah, I’m not delirious. He really is in China. Both of us were. I opened a portal to get back.”
And left Stark there? Not jibing, not jibing at all.
“And what exactly were the pair of you doing in China?”
Loki shrugged. “Oh come on, Steph! You know the stuff they’ve got buried under the Great Wall. We were looking for a couple of grimoires.”
Of course you would be…
“And annoyed a guardian?”
“Nope, if it was, it’d have left us alone once we ran. This one is from one of the deeper vaults. We didn’t mean to open it, but something went wrong…Long story, I’ll give you the cliffsnotes later.”
Strange nodded. He had never been there himself, but he knew enough of the matter to know what sort of entities would be bound in a vault under the Great Wall.
“There were a bunch of them. We got the rest packed back into the vault and slammed the door, but this beauty got away.”
Strange grimaced. If a shadow demon had gotten loose at a major tourist attraction like that… “How many dead?”
“None. I managed to put a binding on it.”
The human relaxed slightly at that. A shadow demon would have to retreat to its homeground at dawn – any ‘release’ would last only one night. At dawn, it’d be off back to China, willing or not. The binding only had to hold for a few more hours.
“What sort of a binding?”
“Bound it to myself”
Strange’s eyes widened in horror. “You…bound a freaking shadow demon to yourself?”
The young god shrugged. “Hey, we didn’t have a lot of options! I needed to get that thing under some sort of control before it got to the tourists.”
“So you…” the human shook his head half awed, half exasperated.
Binding a demon to oneself was a last resource step. Once that spell was performed, the demon would no longer be able to harm anyone except the one who cast the spell – at least, till said caster was dead.
“Bound it and ran – it caught up halfway, I opened a portal and leaped back here. Somewhere here, anyway.”
“And the car?”
“Borrowed. Needed some way to get to your place before I passed out. plus, farther from the portal, tougher for the thing to find me.”
“It will find you. That’s what a binding spell does. It’s a two way connection. It knows where you are.”
And it knows that your life is the only thing standing between it and the delicious humans crowding the planet. Yes, it would have to return to the vaults at dawn, but dawn was still too many hours away. A shadow demon could get a lot of dining done in those hours. And right now, all its will would be focused on getting to Loki.
“D Minus for common sense, A Plus for sheer guts” And quick thinking, Strange had to admit. If he was reading the situation right, those two lunatics had had no warning before the demons burst out on them. Loki had probably had only seconds to complete the spell. “Now let’s get you somewhere safe”
Loki frowned. “Safe? Your wards…”
“The wards would protect only those within.”
“It can’t hurt anyone else till it gets me!”
“Yeah, it can’t get anyone – directly. But if it begins to tear apart the building to get to you and a ton of bricks fall on some poor sod, that won’t be direct. Won’t be stopped by the binding. I’m not going to have a showdown with a shadow demon in the middle of my city.”
“Point noted. So…where?”
Strange sighed and moved to the center of the room. Opening portals was tricky business – it took way too much time to be used as emergency escapes. So, of course, most high level sorcerers usually kept a couple of short cut portals ready, ‘charged’ enough to be called upon easily in case of emergency. Strange focused on the portal he wanted.
“Looks good” Loki agreed.
……………………………..
The place was good, even if he said so himself.
Strange had been planning his ‘safe room’ for a while – since he received word of Hela’s most recent rampage, at any rate. If she turned up in Midgard again, with or without Thanos , they may find themselves running.
Not something you wanted to admit in public when you were supposed to be Earth’s best line of defense, but even the best occasionally needed a place to retreat to.
At first sight, the panic room didn’t look like much. Just a plain, rather clinical room – tiled walls and floor, fluorescent lights, a bank of security monitors, a couple of beds, a work desk which included both a fully charged laptop and a drawer filled with emergency magical supplies, canned rations and medical kits.
Just your garden variety nuclear proof bunker. One built to defend against nuclear level magical threats – of which a shadow demon was certainly one.
Strange half-carried, half-led Loki to one of the beds. “Lie down. If – when – the thing catches up, I may need a hand.”
Surprisingly, the trickster obeyed with no protest – even a Norse god couldn’t recover from the kind of pounding he had taken this soon. Strange made a mental note to give the kid a more detailed checkup once he could be sure they had some breathing room before the demon caught up.
The perimeter alarms flared.
Strange cursed under his breath. If the demon was already here, it meant it had been way too close for comfort – it probably had been just seconds away from blasting the building when they teleported out.
Well, at least here there was no one to get caught in the crossfire – he would be surprised if there was even one human in a radius of ten miles. He had chosen the place with that as a major consideration. He had seen enough collateral damage to last him a life time, thank you very much.
“Quick guy” Loki commented, getting to his feet rather shakily.
Strange impatiently gestured for him to stay where he was. There was the chance that perimeter defenses would deter the demon for a while. The lights went out. So much for deterrence.
The demon was inside. He could now sense it – something ancient, something filled with a thirst for destruction and destruction alone. Heading straight for them.
“So what else is new” he conjured a handful of flames which rose to the ceiling. Just as bright as the electric lights, and under these circumstances, considerably more reliable.
He stepped to the door. From somewhere up the sloping hallway leading to the surface, there came a sizzling sound and an inhuman scream. Good. Not all of the defenses were to the demon’s tastes, apparently.
“That just made it angry” Loki said from right behind him.
“I told you to stay in bed!”
“You said you’ll need help when the thing caught up.”
“I said I may.”
Before the argument went further, the demon finally put in an appearance. Strange almost froze as he caught sight of it, standing at the upper end of the hallway. It was vaguely humanoid in form – very vaguely, since it seemed to be sort of…flowing.
Shadow demon.
Now he understood why they named it that. It was composed of what seemed to be liquefied darkness. All the shadows cast around them quivered as if it was exerting some kind of magnetic pull. Even the conjured flames seemed to dull.
“Not much of a looker” Loki commented.
The kid had gone paler, despite his mocking tone. He was afraid – and rightly so. They could sense the demon’s power only too well even at this distance. If it got to them…
“Mine” the demon snarled, a shadowy hand extending towards Loki.
Not quite a hand. more like an amoeba’s pseudopod. It stopped before it had gone a few centimeters. Good. The shields were in fine fetter.
“Not so soon” Strange called out. “Get gone, creature. This is no place for you and yours.”
Dramatic, much? Well, some standards had to be maintained. And some traditions.
The demon paused, as if thinking it through, then…surged forward. Sort of. Bits of the shadow form broke of, melting into new creatures. Mix-and-match chimeras out of ancient nightmares. That wasn’t drama, just what it looked like.
The shadow creatures pushed against the barrier of the wards. Strange could feel the pressure in his mind, as the spells he had so carefully and painstakingly cast began to splinter under the assault. Some of the shadow creatures melted away into nothing under the steady power of the defense fields, but more than enough remained.
“It’s trying to wear down the shields” Loki pointed out.
“Yeah, I noticed.” Could it? It sure looked that way.
He could sense the fields weakening. They wouldn’t last all that much longer. Strange decided that the shields deserved a little extra help. balls of fire shot from his hands at the shadow creatures. The ones they touched melted in a flare of flame.
“Cool” Loki acknowledged.
Cool it may be, but it wouldn’t stop the thing for long. The shadow creatures were less parts of itself and more illusions. Illusions that would have been real enough to kill them, but not real enough to hurt the demon when they were destroyed.
The demon paused, then moved a hand as if throwing something. A ball of swirling darkness loosed itself from the creature and surged towards them – towards Loki, technically, but Strange had positioned himself in the way.
The layers of defense around them should have stopped the spell cold – instead, all it did was to deflect it slightly. Strange’s quickly conjured shield barely managed to re direct it. The established shields were beginning to wear down, after all.
The demon’s not-quite-there face morphed into the parody of a smile. It gestured grandly, then seemed to flow towards them. It was like watching a tsunami wave approaching. Strange glanced at Loki.
“Need a hand?” the trickster may have been terrified, but he was grinning with undisguised excitement. Centuries with Thor had rubbed off on the kid quite a bit.
“On my word” Strange said curtly “Keep enough of your power back to stay on your feet. You aren’t done healing.”
Loki chuckled, but nodded. Strange remained perfectly still, watching the creature approach. Time it right. Just right.
“NOW!”
Golden-red and green-gold rays of light shot out from their hands, perfectly synchronized. The light met the wall of shadows half way. There was a blaze of light, a blast that almost deafened the human sorcerer. Dark blobs rained down…and merged together.
“Tough sell” Loki said, his eyes on the creature that now towered over them.
“I’ve heard of pulling yourself back together, but this is ridiculous” Strange muttered.
That shot – combined power from the sorcerer supreme of Midgard and the god of magic (even if the latter was far from being at the top of his game) should have been enough to send that beastie back down. Shadow demons were apparently even tougher that legends would have you believe.
The wards and the defense spells would have weakened it – if it was still capable of such feats now… Something that looked like a blend of a lightning bolt and a serpent slashed towards them from the creature. Strange didn’t manage to deflect it fully this time. Loki cried out as the forcewave hit him, flinging him backwards.
“Loki!”
“Still here!” the kid managed to call out from where he fell. Some of his wounds had begun to bleed again.
Damn.
As the demon moved forward, sparks surged around it. The different layers of spells. All being shred apart. Strange tried to concentrate on the wards, trying to hold them in place with sheer willpower. But it was too much for even him. The demon had too many millennia of power to draw on, too much pent up rage it could channel.
The sorcerer supreme’s eyes narrowed. It couldn’t kill him directly – but it could fling whatever spell it pleased at Loki. And if a human sorcerer happened to be in the way of said spells, too bad.
And if it did get Loki, he knew he would be dessert the next moment – unless he could run while it was dealing with the kid.
Nah, not an option.
He placed himself firmly between the demon and the Norse god, power gathering around him. He didn’t dare glance back, didn’t dare say a word. He would have to hope that Loki got the same idea as he did. If not…well, too bad. He could hear the kid struggling to his feet behind him.
“You should have stayed aside, human” the creature snarled.
The last line of defense activated. A swirl of colors and sparks, sizzles, screams. Not good. Spells are supposed to work in near silence when they were working right. This cacophony meant that the defenses were being worn down.
Alright.
Finally, after too long a moment, the lights faded. The defenses were gone. The demon stood within the safe room. Strange stood right in its path, blocking its way to the trickster. Loki had managed to get to his feet and stood leaning against the wall.
“Mine” the shadow hissed. And surged forward again
. “Wrong move”
One of his silver daggers flew from Loki’s hands. Midair, a wave of scarlet-gold light surged from Strange’s hands to merge with it. For one split second, the dagger gleamed with scarlet fire. The next instant, it had buried itself between the shadow demon’s eyes – at least, where the eyes would have been in a humanoid face.
Under normal conditions, at the height of its power, the demon would likely have been able to shrug off the combined attack. But it was not at the height of its power. It had had to spent too much of it crossing the wards, overcoming the layers of spells. And then it had had to shield itself from the magical equivalent of a minefield Loki and Strange had flung at it. It had been worn down, bit by bit.
That had been the plan. That had always been the plan. If the threat is too much for you to take, whittle it down. Bit by steady bit. This time, when the dazzle faded, the bits of shadow didn’t start to merge.
“That won’t hold it forever – but it will hold till dawn.”
“Dawn’s enough” Loki said “the Vault’ll suck it right back in at first birdsong. Got to call Tony – tell him what happened.”
“I’ll do that.”
Knowing Stark, he may now be doing anything from chartering a private jet to stealing a private jet to simply trying to fly back from china with his suit (if he had one on)
“Right..” the kid was swaying on his feet. Strange got there just in time to catch him before he hit the ground.
“Bedtime, kiddo.”
“Don’t call me kid” Loki murmured “I was fighting battles before you were out of diapers.”
“Yeah, but I’m still the Sorcerer Supreme here. And incidentally, just saved your life.”
“Sorcerer supreme” Loki echoed, half asleep already “Am I the only one who thinks that sounds like something you order from McDonalds?”