Turn them back to the ash from whence they came.
Grunting, I hoisted the canister and slammed it down on the ground.
A faint bump sounded behind the truck, and the vehicle’s suspension squeaked a little. I jerked my head up, ears prone.
No other sounds.
Just the body slumping to the side, right?
I dropped the hose and ran back to check.
The armored, bloodstained enclosure came into view.
One look, and all the breath whooshed out of my lungs.
Empty.
The body was gone.
The head, too.
“Fuck,” I muttered, spinning around three hundred sixty degrees, the skin all down my back bristling with pins and needles. No one in sight.
The figure I’d seen . . . could it be?
Groping behind me, I caught the rim of the bucket and yanked it out, overturned it on the dirt.
Blood trickled out.
Blood . . . and nothing else.
He’d taken his hands with him.
“FUCK!” I yelled.
Demons were notoriously difficult to kill. Like cockroaches.
Cut off their heads, cut off their hands, eviscerate them, drown them, it didn’t matter.
A scuffle of footsteps reached my ears. From the other side of my Hummer . . . no doubt circling back around to ambush me.
Now it was hunting me.
I drew my Glock and flattened myself against the passenger side, panic afire in my lungs. It shouldn’t have healed like that.
The western sky dimmed to teal, the shadowy woods darkened and encroached on my truck.
Night.
In darkness, there was only one smart way to fight a demon—or demons, if what I suspected was true.
Run.
Run your ass off.
Demons were natural born predators. They had superior night vision, more acute senses, quicker reflexes, better hand-eye coordination.
I had shit.
Shit and a big ass problem. No other demon knew I was still alive. If I let this one escape, I’d have three hundred demons’ dicks trying to crawl up my asshole in about twelve seconds. Which meant I better stay and fight.
The thermal scope. Had that too.
My hand slapped the top of my Hummer, where I’d set my helmet. Scanning the forest, I dragged it over my head and flipped down the scope over my left eye. The world came alive in shades of green and yellow trees, still warm from sunset.
But demons’ blood ran hot—104° Fahrenheit—thing would be glowing like neon.
Explained their vicious hot tempers, too.
Like the fact that this fucker had stuck around to take on Jame Asher when the smart thing to do would be to escape and call in reinforcements.
Still didn’t mean I liked it.
Crouching on all fours, a glowing white figure crept into my periphery, slinking behind the tree line. A tiger creeping in for the kill.
I tensed, my knuckles tightening on the grip, but didn’t let on I’d seen him.
My scope used a fisheye lens, meaning it compressed a hundred and eighty degrees of infrared vision into a nice little bubble. With my truck protecting my backside, the scope let me literally see in all directions at once.
Demons think we have lousy peripheral vision. We do.
But not tonight.
The figure burst from the trees and closed in with lightning speed, appearing as a blurry white streak to my left eye through the scope.
I spun, dropped to a knee, and fired three shots before it reached me. To my left eye, the bullets made white-hot welts in its torso, their entry points glowing even hotter than the demon’s scalding flesh.
But if cutting off the beast’s head and hands—both reattached, to my horror—didn’t kill it, then three bullets stood no chance.
The demon kicked the gun out of my hand, pried off my helmet, and flung it aside, plunging me into sudden blackness. Only the whistle of air alerted me to the kick aimed at my head.
I ducked, but not fast enough. The blow slammed my face into the dirt. My lip cracked, and blood mixed with the chalky taste of silt in my mouth.
I blinked away stars. The next impact, I knew, would pack enough punch to break my neck.
I threw myself to the side, and the kick grazed my ear, leaving my eardrum ringing.
With a lunge, I caught the creature’s ankle and gave it a hard twist, wrenching it around with all my might. He rolled into it with ease, somersaulting over me, and landing on his feet. He came at me again.
Well, shit.
Not a chance of besting him in hand-to-hand combat, not at night.
His heel blotted out the sky. I could picture it then—my skull crushed in, dead in an instant.
I whipped myself into a roll, and the demon’s heel slammed the ground where I’d been, lashing me with dirt.
I kept rolling, all the way under my truck, and popped out on the other side.
His footsteps sprinted around to meet me. I lunged for the driver-side door. The demon vaulted over the hood of the car, metal groaning under his weight. A race.
My fingers jammed under the handle and yanked the door open, slamming it into his face as he swooped in from the side. For a split-second, it stunned him, and I used the distraction to sink my hunting knife into his side, twisting it in up to the hilt.
He staggered backward to yank it out, giving me a chance to get inside my Hummer.
No sooner had I slammed the door shut behind me than the demon’s face thumped against the glass. Rocked the whole truck.
Thought that was a regular window, asshole?
He’d just gotten a faceful of bulletproof glass. Demon proof.
His black eyes narrowed to slits, glaring at me while his hot breath misted on the window.
“Going to wish you didn’t hang around, bud,” I muttered, cranking the ignition.
The engine roared to life, coming alive like a monster under the hood.
He seemed to realize his mistake.
Should’ve escaped when you had the chance.
He backed away, shifty-eyed, then turned tail and ran, his loping silhouette receding into the trees.
I peeled out after him, flicking on my headlights, the high beams, the side-mounted floodlights, and the overhead light rack, bathing the forest in dazzling blue-white light.
Not night anymore, is it?
The reflectors on his tennis shoes bobbed in and out of the glare. I floored the car, and the Hummer lurched over a boulder and blasted through a rotted out log, keeping right on his heels. His palm flashed as he shoved off a tree.
Again, how? His head and hands had been severed . . .
Unlike humans, demon cells continued to live and multiply despite massive organ failure. Deprived of a beating heart, oxygenated blood, a central nervous system, their flesh merely entered a state of suspended animation, which could last for days, for weeks . . . indefinitely, given the right conditions.
I’d learned the hard way.
The demon wasn’t dead until he was a smoking pile of ash.
Their limbs re-sprouted, their organs grew back. Their heads . . .
Apparently those could be reattached.
Biologically, they were tough-as-hell little shits, honed over millennia of evolution. They were spirits of darkness inhabiting bodies of flesh. They were held together by evil. By the death and misfortune they harvested from us.
But still.
They were animals.
Once you cut off the head, even if the flesh still lived, the organism would cease to function in any real capacity. That was simple anatomy. A decapitated demon you could safely treat as dead until yo
u got the chance to burn the body.
Only this one didn’t play by the rules.
Suddenly, my quarry feinted left, veering toward the thickest part of the woods. Cursing, I gave the wheel a desperate yank, fishtailing in the mud before the off-road tires gripped, and the vehicle plowed into a nest of undergrowth. Bushes whacked the front grill, clawed at it like skeletal hands before they were dragged under. Visibility down to zero.
“C’mon, c’monnn,” I muttered, white-knuckling the wheel.
I burst clear onto an overgrown trail, wrestling the Hummer back up behind him, riding his ass hard.
My eyes narrowed on the speedometer. The hell . . . ?
The needle crossed twenty . . . then twenty-five . . . then thirty . . .
This guy was freaking Seabiscuit.
His legs pumped faster and faster, whipping back with inhuman speed, driving him straight toward a thicket at the end of the trail.
He topped out at 45 mph—the speed of a thoroughbred racehorse. No, even demons couldn’t run that fast.
He was being helped.
And demons didn’t run in straight lines.
Normally, they zigzagged, ping-ponged all over the place, skittered back and forth like spiders, never straight lines. They knew better.
I sensed it then.
Trap.
I slammed on the brakes just as the demon vanished into the thicket.
The Hummer blasted into it and careened through a tunnel of vegetation. Once the vegetation fell away, I got a good look at what lay ahead of me.
Open air.
Fifty feet away, land ended. Now thirty. The Hummer was eating up the distance far too quickly. Twenty feet remained. I gritted my teeth as my foot held steady on the brakes.
Ten feet.
At last, the vehicle shuddered to an agonizing stop, the front wheels crunching over the edge of a cliff. I could only stare as the demon soared off the sixty-foot drop, arms and legs spread-eagled before it landed on a slab of bedrock at the bottom of a ravine, bounced into a roll, and hit the ground running, utterly unharmed.
Bitch had been leading me toward a cliff.
Clever animal.
I had one more shot at this. Seconds left before he slipped out of range.
I punched the roof hatch open and from behind the seats dragged out my coup de grâce—the six-barrel machinegun I’d paid a fortune for—and locked it in place on the roof mount, my ammo belt clanging against the metal.
Then I lit up the ravine.
The weapon blazed like a torch, firing off a constant stream of bullets. Down below, the bedrock erupted in a shower of sparks. Screaming my lungs horse, I fired the shots across the demon, then back again, cleaving him in two, in four, ripping him to shreds.
He fell to the ground, his flesh flayed under the onslaught. His clothes caught fire, yet what remained of him continued to writhe.
Still, my finger crushed the trigger, still I sprayed bullets. After a minute of continuous fire, the gun fell silent, its smoking barrels glowing a dull red as they finally spun to a stop.
Out of ammo.
But the creature was dead at last. There could be no regenerating from this.
I panted from the exertion, ears ringing. I’d probably go deaf by age thirty.
But to be sure, I should go down and burn the body—
The impossible happened.
Out of the shredded body parts, the demon rose again. His spilled blood and guts withdrew back into his body, his torn skin resealed, and his broken, dislocated limbs straightened with a series of sharp cracks. He stood slowly, now stark naked, and threw a final look back before he loped away, spry as a gazelle.
My jaw tightened.
No. Fucking. Way.
Glaring after his receding form, I bellowed at the top of my lungs, “Go on, tell them! Tell them Asher’s back!” I wheezed, then yelled again. “Tell them I’m coming . . . and tell them I’m going to burn every last one of you!”
My voice echoed back to me. The demon dropped into a crevice and vanished.
I wiped off my mouth with the back of my hand.
I was so fucked.
That shouldn’t have happened—him healing like that. Demons heads didn’t fuse back onto their bodies in five seconds flat. They didn’t get pulverized only to reform before your eyes.
It didn’t work like that.
As far as I knew, this particular demon didn’t have an affinity for accelerated healing. Sure, he would have healed eventually, but only marginally faster than a human.
He’d been helped.
My gaze went back to the dark forest, now creaking with night sounds.
Instinctively, my nose wrinkled.
There was another demon in these woods. Operating behind the scenes.
I should have known.
But to have healed one of its kind from a distance . . .
I’d never encountered that kind of power before.
I needed to capture it. Tonight.
Come tomorrow, I would have the entire race of demons hot on my scent and I would be a dead man for sure.
If this one was smart—and it must be smart, since it hadn’t shown its face—then it would probably head straight for the portal.
Lana
We call it misfortunate magic.
Just as an animal must give its life to feed you, so too must creatures pay a tithe for the magic that sustains us. It’s all part of the circle of life. Why the victims must pay that debt is the mystery of the ages, but that is the way it’s always been.
And now, somewhere in the world, twenty-six blood donors would be having a very bad day. I murmured my thanks for their sacrifice, unwilling though it might be.
I rose silently to my feet, listening to the sounds of the night.
I knew Fidel escaped—that much I could sense through our connection. Which meant that somewhere out there, the most formidable human known to Infernari just lost a kill.
He would be angry.
He would ask questions.
He would figure out Fidel had help.
He would hunt me.
He would kill me.
I whispered a prayer to the Great Mother, and then I sprinted for dear life toward the cave entrance.
If I died, my kind would be doomed. That was how tenuous our existence was.
I paused just inside the cave’s mouth, where the ground fell away and plunged deep into the darkness below. Salvation lay somewhere down there.
I threw a glance over my shoulder. My ears twitched.
Utter silence.
I faced forward again, took a deep breath, and jumped.
The trip down wasn’t particularly smooth or pleasant this time. I was too fraught with panic for much finesse, and I hadn’t thought to save much power for myself to make up for it with magic. Foresight was a skill better suited to humans than Infernari. And still, despite my hurried movements, the descent felt like it took ages.
The cave narrowed abruptly, and my hands slapped the wet, gummy walls as I lowered myself. The cave opened once more, and I knew I was getting close to the bottom. So close.
Even in the deep darkness, I saw the cave floor far beneath me. A mass of stalagmites covered it, several thicker at their base than the tree I’d hid behind.
Abruptly, I released my hold of the wall, dropping down. I landed in a crouch between two large spires, my excitement mounting.
I’d be home in less than a minute.
I stood, casting a glance far above me. No sign of Asher.
Jame Asher.
No wonder I had been so intimidated by him even before I learned his identity. On some level I knew, I knew, how formidable the man I stared at
was. And then, to see him in action . . . He managed to turn the portal master into nothing more than raw meat. Twice.
I had to tell the others that Asher was alive. That he was just as powerful and ruthless as the stories made him out to be. No human should have been able to capture, let alone kill, a portal master.
But he had.
I headed towards the lapping water, towards the portal.
That’s when I felt it—or rather, when I didn’t feel what I should’ve.
The alluring pull of the gateway was absent; the cave lacked its usual breath of magic.
My heart pounded faster, forming a melody of sorts with the dripping water. I moved through the cavern, the chill of the place seeping into my bones. So achingly cold down here.
My gaze roved over my surroundings. If my magic couldn’t find the portal, my eyes would.
There.
Next to the shallow pool, I recognized the familiar cluster of columns from some of my earlier trips. I had thought at the time that they looked like the most ancient, abandoned castles of my homeland, their walls rounded and smoothed by thousands of years of wind and rain.
Only now, now these pillars lay scattered in fragmented heaps.
I strode over to them, not daring to breathe, not daring to believe.
Something crunched beneath my boot. I lifted the heel of my shoe. Several sharp, porous shards had embedded themselves into my shoe sole. I picked one between my fingers, brought it to my nose.
Bone.
Only the most residual magic still clung to it. But I could tell the difference between a human bone and an Infernarus. This was the latter. And I knew from my studies that portal masters often used our ancestors in the creation of these gateways. To find the bones smashed to pieces . . .
I walked over the area where the portal should’ve been. My surroundings did not melt away, and the fusion of magic that came with crossing never washed over me.
Cold dread coiled low in my gut.
The portal had collapsed, doorway irreparably smashed.
I was marooned.
Blood and Sin (The Infernari Book 1) Page 3
