“I'm repaying an old debt.”
I shot her a curious look.
“I owe everything I am today to Taske. He's the closest thing to a father I've ever had.”
“Really? Taske didn't quite strike me as the fuzzy paternal type.”
Was that a flicker of a smile in her face?
“I was an orphan from the Ukraine,” she explained. “My parents were murdered by the Russian mob. There weren't many options for girl like myself.” She paused and clenched her jaw. “Taske saw me dancing at a club and took me in. Gave me money, an education, a home. A future.”
“In exchange for what? He might've saved your body but did he save your soul?”
“My soul isn’t the only one that needs saving.”
Apprehension coiled up my throat as she turned away from me. What had she meant by that? I was suddenly gripped with the certainty that Vittoria knew something she wasn’t telling me, and it disturbed me greatly. I felt tempted to push her against the wall and shake her until she told me what I wanted to know. But it was no good. I had no doubt she’d take her secrets to the grave if given no other choice.
I stifled my growing frustration best I could. The answers to my questions would have to wait as we had reached the main bank floor. It was pitch black. All of the lights had been blown out during the last attack, the room now soaked in oily darkness.
I slipped on the night-vision goggles, and the bank transformed into a spectral green world. There were no signs of our demonic friends.
“I think I dropped it near the cashiers.” Vittoria said. “Fan out and start looking.”
Dimitri and I took our first tentative step onto the bank floor, eyes scoping, fingers whitening on the triggers of our weapons. I drew comfort from the weight of the sword in my hand.
“There! I see the bag,” Vittoria exclaimed after a minute of searching.
I turned in the direction she was pointing in. Indeed there it was, at the center of the bank floor, outlined in spectral green.
Almost as if it was waiting for us.
As if it was bait for a trap...
“This is a bad idea,” Dimitri said. “There's no other way,” Vittoria said.
We advanced deeper into the space, creeping forward as quietly as possible. Tension mounted with each step.
I looked over my shoulder. Nothing.
We kept advancing. The bag was tantalizingly close. Just sitting there. Still no movement in the dark. Good.
We were moving faster now. I recognized the look in Vittoria's eyes: hope.
My gaze returned to the bag, only to spot the shadow of something that looked like wings. The ghostly green figure outlined in my night-vision goggles made my body turn rigid with terror. I felt the shock in the pit of my stomach, a visceral, physical reaction. Screw it! Sword drawn, I sprinted toward the danger.
A demonic form swooped from above. My heart lurched, adrenaline flooding my system.
Hellseeker’s muzzle flashed. Three quick shots. The creature was cut down in mid-flight and crashed into the wall, but its wounds were already healing.
Another demonic beast reared from the darkness. Its forked, serpentine tails undulated, whipping out toward Vittoria.
I unleashed another fusillade. Blessed bullets exploded into the entity’s chest and wings. A third creature dropped from the ceiling right in front of Vittoria.
Her pistol flared. A withering hail of silver bullets drove the winged demon back. She never flinched or lost her cool. Merely kept pulling the trigger. Vittoria was an impressive force of nature. In control of her fear and emotions, her finely tuned instincts matched only by the skills she brought to the table. I wondered what this capable woman might’ve become if fate hadn’t dealt her such a bad hand.
My musings were interrupted as more shapes appeared from every direction. A swarm seeking to cut us off.
Time to join the battle in earnest.
I zig-zagged between the bank’s marble columns, demons streaking after me. My sword flashed out and cleaved one of the demon’s wings. The creature bellowed before another volley from Vittoria drove it back. My blessed pistol joined the symphony of destruction.
I reached the bag first.
My fingers closed around its strap, scooping it up in mid-movement while spraying the floor with more magical bullets. The ring of fast-approaching winged shadows shifted and howled in agony.
Four more demons were closing in around me, intent on cutting me off from Vittoria and Dimitri. And Hellseeker was fresh out of ammo. I had just used up my last magazine. Demon Slayer was my only weapon now.
“Vittoria!” I yelled.
She turned toward me. I reacted more on instinct than rational thought. Tapping into all my strength, I hurled the bag like a football.
It sailed over the encroaching circle of demons and landed in front of Vittoria's feet with a loud whoomp.
She immediately scooped it up, and in the same movement, shot one of the demons in the face. That a girl.
My sword lashed out and found its first demonic dancing partner. I continued hacking a path through the winged horde. As I fought for my life—and perhaps my soul—I kept watching Vittoria from the corner of my eye.
Her eyes lit up as she flipped the bag open. One hand snatched the contract while the other hand pumped round after round into the whirling, sharp-toothed darkness.
I pivoted, my sword finding another demon beast. The winged bodies were starting to pile up around my feet.
I scoped the main floor. Another phalanx of monsters was closing in fast. The magical blade was great, but I wasn’t a skilled swordsman who could take on an army of monsters. At least not yet. I was in dire need of a firearm. As the unholy beasts hurled themselves at me, fangs and talons extended, my eyes found Max's mauled body. The safecracker lay splayed across the desk where he’d landed earlier. A machine pistol was still slung across his shoulder.
The battlefield slowed to a crawl as I sprinted toward the desk. I launched myself into the air. Body extended, energy focused. I hit the desk, my fingers closing around Max's weapon. The two demons were right upon me, and with a mad grin I cried out, “Come and get it, assholes!”
I gleefully unloaded into the first beast. The furious fusillade slammed the monster back. The demon crashed into another desk and knocked over its computer.
I spun around, looking for my next target.
Most of the demons were down for the time being. But not for long. Wounds were already healing. Taske’s ammo was powerful enough to slow these monsters but couldn’t destroy them for good.
I spotted Vittoria near the exit. She turned, bag under her arm, and gave me a fierce grin. Elated by our victory, she became careless. Oblivious to the moving shadow behind her until it was too late. She turned, gun up, but her reaction came a moment too late.
Dimitri loomed in the green night-vision light behind her, more menacing than a demon, his serrated hunting knife up.
Before Vittoria could react, he sank the knife into her shoulder.
The Russian’s words filled the room, sizzling with malice. “No one fucking points a gun at me and lives.”
Vittoria cried out and crumpled to the floor.
Dimitri scooped up the bag. Through clenched teeth, blood pooling around her, I could hear Vittoria say, “Burn in hell, you bastard!”
“You first.”
Dimitri made a go for the nearest exit.
I raised Demon Slayer and charged after him. The mystical weapon would be equally effective against the living as the dead.
Dimitri reacted with the reflexes of a career mercenary. He brought up his gun and sprayed the floor at my feet. I hurled myself behind a nearby desk. Wood splintered.
An instant later, Dimitri was gone. And so was the bag.
Damn. I sprang from my makeshift cover and tried to ignore the clicking sounds building behind me. The demons were swiftly recovering.
I ran toward Vittoria. Realized too late that her pistol wa
s pointed at me. BLAM! A bullet sliced above my head, missing me by inches. A warning shot.
“Stay back!”
“Let me help you.”
The gun in Vittoria's hand was trembling, slick with blood from the stab wound, her face a warring mask of emotions.
Part of her wanted to believe me. Wanted to trust me.
“Look, we can still get out of here. But you must let me help. Can you do that?”
Slowly, she lowered the gun, her arm oozing blood.
I balled up her scarf and pressed it against the wound to stop the bleeding. Once the red flow slowed, I lifted Vittoria back to her feet. There was a beat between us, a hint of unspoken emotion, but it wasn’t meant to last.
A roar tore through the bank. We both turned at the same time toward the chilling sound. My jaw dropped as the lobby suddenly filled with hellish orange light. A river of fire was spilling into the main floor from a nearby doorway. Flames danced up the walls, devouring everything, setting the whole place ablaze.
As we backed away from the inferno, the flames came together and formed the shape of a monstrous beast.
That did it. I’d officially had enough of the Hagen Bank.
Vittoria and I jerked into motion.
Once again, we were running for our lives.
16
Dimitri’s weary eyes nervously scoped his surroundings as he sprinted down the corridor. He was alone. Good.
He had always planned to raid the vault and make this a job he could retire on in style. This job should have been his ticket. Well, the bitch and this cursed bank had other plans.
He might not understand any of this mystical bullcrap, but he had an instinctive grasp of people. He knew Taske would pay a fortune for the contract in the bag. With Vittoria out of the picture, he could leverage the old man for every cent he had. If the old bastard wanted to save his blackened soul, he would have to pay up. The fee Taske had originally promised him was a joke compared to what this piece of paper was truly worth.
But before he could collect his bounty, he would need to make it out of here alive. Paranoid by nature, he decided to take a quick glance at the contract to make sure everything was kosher. He snapped open the bag and his breath hitched. What the fuck? The bag was empty!
The bitch had tricked him. She must’ve removed the contract without him noticing it.
He pivoted, weapon ready, and ran back the way he’d come. Two doors jumped up in front of him, and he experienced a moment of confusion. Which one led back to the office? Had there even been two doors earlier?
His eyes ticked back and forth between the two options.
After another beat, Dimitri picked the right door.
He passed into a second hallway, and after a few cautious steps, he realized this definitely wasn’t the right way. The corridor was lined with barred cages. His eyes lit up with greed as he took in the stacks of gold bars inside the cages. Maybe he could just grab a few…no, this was a distraction. His best bet was to get his hands on Taske’s contract. Once back in the real world, nothing would be able to match its value.
He headed back to the door, but it had vanished.
“It's been a long time, Dimitri.”
Dimitri spun toward a blond man who looked to be in his mid-thirties, his features pale, the eyes twin black orbs.
Dimitri backed away from the figure, his terror growing as he recognized the man.
“You can’t be here,” he said, unconsciously slipping into Russian as he spoke. “I killed you.“ The blond man stepped into the light. Bloody craters in his torso oozed scarlet blood.
“I was your first kill,” the man said.
“But not your last,” a second voice finished behind him.
Shocked, Dimitri spun around. A powerfully built African-American now loomed behind him, the man’s neck a mass of bruised flesh, eyes a wasteland of burst capillaries. Dimitri vividly remembered strangling the crazed drug dealer with a penchant for underage girls, pitting his own physical strength against the perverted bastard and walking away the victor.
Dimitri had always prided himself on his lack of fear in the face of mortal danger. Sights that would make a normal man break down into a ball of sobbing terror merely gave him pause. He had read articles in psychological magazines about people like himself: the five percent of the population who experience almost no fear. It explained why he had swiftly risen in stature in his chosen profession. Violence came as naturally to him as breathing, and he never dwelled on either the consequences of his actions or the things that might go wrong.
That’s why he could bring up his machine pistol and target the men he had murdered years earlier without even the slightest tremor in his hands.
He immediately felt better, drawing strength from the gun. Some people relied on amulets and other lucky charms, but Dimitri only believed in his gun and knife. Everything in this rotten world ultimately succumbed to cold steel.
A third voice joined the first two—and this time, Dimitri did flinch.
“You thought you could get away with it!”
A brutal wound split the new arrival’s head in two where Dimitri had driven an ax into his skull three years earlier.
More figures peeled from the dark cages. A fourth man who had been burnt to a crisp, his charred form leaving a trail of ash behind him. Dimitri had forgotten the dead man’s name but remembered the terror in his eyes when Dimitri had drenched him in gasoline and set him on fire. “How much to snuff out a life?” the burned man demanded to know. “Twenty-five grand? Fifty? I sure hope it was worth it!”
“Stay away from me,” Dimitri said. “All of you. You are dead! I killed you. I FUCKING KILLED YOU ALL!”
Dimitri unloaded into the murder victims. The bullets ripped into the ghosts from his past but failed to open new wounds or even slow them down. Instead, as each bullet connected with one of the dead apparitions, a bloody hole opened in Dimitri's own body.
The Russian killer eyed his mangled chest with horror. Blood bubbled from his lips, and the taste of copper stained his chattering teeth.
“I killed you all!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.
The shuffle of advancing footsteps grew louder as Dimitri’s legs caved in and he collapsed. Inexorably, the ghosts drew closer.
Shadows engulfed his face as the circle of his victims closed in around him. And that’s when Dimitri noticed the gold bars in their hands. The revenants had scooped them up from the bank’s cages, each bar easily worth a half a million dollars.
An instant later, the specters gleefully drove the bars down on Dimitri. Blood spattered the gleaming gold.
17
Vittoria and I were running toward the office that promised our only hope of escape. I hazarded a glance over my shoulder and felt the air being sucked from my lungs. A furnace blast roared into the corridor behind us. Churning flames carpeted the ornately decorated hallway, steadily advancing like lava. Darkly beautiful, imbued with a preternatural life, it was rapidly closing the distance between us and scorching priceless artwork to cinders as it came.
Ash to ashes, dust to dust, I thought as I ran. Heat prickled my neck. The place had turned into a Sauna.
As soon as we reached the office, I slammed the steel door shut, knowing it might buy us a few more seconds. Vittoria’s eyes shone with terror, mirroring my own fear. We both understood that death was approaching.
My eyes locked on the hole in the ceiling. “The rope!”
Vittoria snapped open the bag and removed the rope. A small grappling hook was attached to one end.
“I can’t,” she said, jerking her chin at her wounded shoulder.
I snatched the rope and hurled the end with the grappling hook rope toward the opening Norton had blasted into the ceiling only an hour earlier. There was no doubt in my mind that the explosives expert was gone. Just another of the many victims of this terrible place.
With an audible clang, the grappling hook snapped around a rocky fissure in the ceiling'
s opening. I yanked on the rope. It seemed to be holding.
“Thank God for small miracles,” Vittoria said.
The arm of her shirt was drenched in red. Weakly, Vittoria's hand grabbed the rope. She tried to pull herself up but failed. There was no strength in her bleeding arm, her muscles refusing to obey her commands.
“Fuck!” she spat.
I dragged a hand through my hair. “You'll never make it.”
“No shit.”
The approaching fire demon’s inhuman roar cut through the chamber, adding further urgency to the situation. It sounded like a series of small explosions going off, then a volcano erupting. The walls and ceiling shook. Cracks ran up the walls, fine dust raining down on us.
The fire demon was almost upon us. I knew what I had to do.
“I’ll go first and pull you up. You’ll have to trust me one more time.”
Vittoria nodded. And then she did something that caught me off guard. She handed me the bag with Taske’s contract.
“If I don’t make it, bring this to Taske. Please.”
I couldn’t believe it. Even faced with death, her loyalty was to the man who had saved her from her old life. Didn’t she realize Taske was using her the way he used everyone in his world? People were means to an end to the man—that much I had already learned. Yet, whatever relationship she shared with Taske, it was the closest thing to love she’d experienced in her tragic life. The sudden insight filled me with a deep sadness. But I would honor her wishes.
“You’ll be able to hand him the contract yourself,” I said.
I wished my voice sounded more convincing as I slung Vittoria’s bag over my shoulder and snatched the rope. I gritted my teeth as I angled my way toward the hole in the ceiling. Skulick and I trained together in the mornings—although since his accident, he’d naturally been focused on upper body strength—but I admit that my heart hadn’t been in our workouts lately. I suddenly wished I hadn’t skipped the salmon ladder. Vittoria watched me in grave silence.
I silenced my roaming thoughts and focused on the task at hand. Reality narrowed to a few simple objectives: Reach the hole in the ceiling. Slip through the opening. Pull Vittoria up into the tunnel.
Demon Dawn (Shadow Detective Book 4) Page 10
