Demon Hunting In Dixie

by Lexi George

  “It’s gone.” Addy stared in bemusement at Brand’s hand. “The cut on your hand is gone.”

  Ansgar gave her that “my poop don’t stink but yours sure does” look she was so crazy about. “Foolish woman. The Dalvahni heal quickly. Do you not know that?”

  That did it. She was going to read his beads for whale shit. She opened her mouth to tell him where to stick his condescending attitude, but Brand spoke first.

  “She knows, brother. She is having trouble accepting it. That is all.”

  Evie put her arm around Addy’s shoulder. “There’s no need to be so stuffy, Ansgar. Addy has had a lot to deal with lately. I think she’s handled things remarkably well, considering all that has happened. You’ve had ten thousand years to get used to who and what you are. Maybe you should spend the next ten thousand years developing a little patience.”

  Whoa, did shy little Evie just give Ansgar a verbal smackdown?

  To Addy’s surprise, Ansgar bowed. “You are right, Evangeline. Adara, I regret my impatience with you. Please accept my apology.”

  “Sure thing, Blondy.” Evie poked her in the side with her elbow. For a curvaceous gal, girlfriend’s elbows were sharp. “Ouch, I mean Ansgar.”

  “Enough,” Brand said. “They are coming. It is time.”

  Addy glanced at him, startled by his sharp tone, and received a shock. Brand’s eyes were hard and flat. He radiated a combination of lethal eagerness and raw, primal power. Ansgar exuded the same restless, coiled energy. They were in warrior mode, she realized with a stab of dismay, two predators on the hunt, eager for the hunt. But, there was no need for them to do the macho warrior thing. Not when there was an alternative.

  They turned to leave.

  “Wait, where are you going?” Addy cried. “Stay here, where it’s safe.”

  Brand turned around, his expression of chilly hauteur reminding her uncomfortably of Ansgar’s. “Dalvahni warriors do not cower behind a shield spell like frightened children. Fighting the djegrali is what we do.”

  Oh, great. She’d insulted his masculinity. Heaven forbid they do the sensible thing and get inside the shield. Oh, no. The big bad Dalvahni warriors had to take on a bunch of crazed, bloodthirsty, soul-sucking demons.

  Fighting the djegrali is what we do. Ooh, he was infuriating, the big, macho jerk. Who knew how many demons were out there or what twisted form they would take? Sure, he and Ansgar were seasoned warriors, but what if they were outnumbered? What if Mr. Nasty brought reinforcements? No one was infallible. What if Brand got hurt . . . or . . . or . . .

  Terror streaked through her, mind numbing, petrifying. Terror for him. And did he care? Oh, no. He was an adrenaline junky, hooked on a djegrali fix, chomping at the bit to kick a little demon boo-tay. He was going to go out there and fight the demons right in front of her, and he expected her to sit in a safe little bubble and watch like a good little woman. No. She did not think so.

  Suddenly, she was furious.

  She slammed the flat of her hand against the invisible wall. “Well, excuse the hell out of me for being worried you might get hurt. Go ahead then. Get yourself killed. See if I care.”

  Hurt flashed in his eyes and was gone. He shrugged and strode after Ansgar.

  Addy flung herself against the shield. “Wait, Brand, I didn’t mean it! I do care. I—I . . .”

  She stopped. Her throat closed up, and the words shriveled on her tongue. What was the matter with her? It was like her brain and her mouth were disconnected. She could not say it. Neither could she let him go like this, facing death with her hateful words ringing in his ears.

  Tears of frustration streamed down her face. She pounded her fists against the shield. “Brand, come back. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Brand.”

  He heard her. He must have heard her, because he came back. She watched him stride across the grass, her heart hammering in her chest. The way he moved was a thing of beauty, lithe, fluid, powerful—the heavy muscular grace of a predator in his prime. She loved the way he moved. She loved everything about him. She loved him.

  He stopped a few paces from the tree, his beautiful archangel features strained and taut, as though he were in the grip of some ferocious inner battle. He took a deep breath. She shrank back instinctively, knowing what was coming. She forgot about the demons, watching with helpless longing and dread as his wicked, beautiful, sensuous mouth curved into a rueful smile. He was going to say it. He tried to tell her last night more than once, but each time she stopped him. It was right there in his eyes, in the hot, aching melting way he looked at her. He loved her. He was going to say it and walk into danger, and leave her with an agony of bitter regret because she was too big a coward to say it back.

  Like hell she was.

  “I love you, Brand,” she blurted.

  A terrible weight lifted from her heart with the words. What a relief it was to say it, how easy and right it felt. I love you. She wanted—no, needed—to say it. What an idiot she had been. She loved him. And he loved her . . . although he hadn’t said it yet.

  He stared at her like she was some strange, exotic animal, this man from another dimension who’d seen dwithmorgers and fought demons in the far reaches of Gorth.

  “What did you say?”

  She gave him a giddy grin. “I said ‘I love you.’ What do you think about that?”

  Thwack! He grinned back and she was a goner, high as a kite from that smile.

  “I think you are the most infuriating, impossible, maddening female I ever met.” His eyes were alight with amusement and enough love to burn her to cinders. “I have been trying to tell you of my damnable feelings since last night, would you but let me. But you defeated me at every turn. You are the most exasperating creature.”

  “Those things you said, maddening, impossible, infuriating and . . . uh . . . uh . . .”

  “Exasperating?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one, exasperating. Those are good things, right?”

  He chuckled and turned again to leave.

  “Hey!” She pounded her fists against the shield. “You can’t walk away without saying it back. That would be rude.”

  “Heaven forbid,” he said without slowing.

  “I mean it, Brand. Brand.”

  He looked back at her then, his gaze hot enough to melt stone. “Very well, if you insist. I love you, Adara Jean Corwin. You have taken my heart by storm. Satisfied?”

  “No, but it’ll do for now.”

  Swallowing the lump of tears in her throat, she watched him stride off to join Ansgar near the center of the park. The drums throbbed closer, louder. It sounded as though the demons had reached the foot of the hill. Any moment they would come over the rise and the battle would begin. Brand could be . . . Brand could be . . .

  Brand and Ansgar drew their weapons. Liquid tongues of flame danced down the blade in Brand’s hand, and the silver and white bow Ansgar held shone with an unearthly light.

  Beside her, Evie made a small sound of dismay. Addy felt a twinge of remorse. She’d been so wrapped up in Brand that she forgot all about Evie. She hurried over to her friend. Evie clung to her, staring in wide-eyed horror across the field.

  “Look,” Evie cried, pointing.

  Two men came up the rise on Main Street dressed in prison whites. Addy recognized the uniforms. Work gangs were a common enough sight on the highway that ran between Hannah and Jordan Springs, where the state penitentiary was located. These men were some of the escaped convicts the sheriff warned them about. If she hadn’t known them by their garb, the words PROPERTY OF THE ALABAMA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS stamped in big black letters on their loose cotton pants and shirts were a big, fat clue. They looked like ordinary men, not demons. No twisted horns or gnarled limbs or bristling, tusk-filled mouths. Except for the gooey purple eyes that wobbled above their snarling mouths like bits of jelly left out in the sun and the blood that stained their clothes and the severed human heads they carried, they looked like ordinary men.

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sp; They saw Ansgar and Brand and swung their gruesome trophies. The heads slammed together with a dull boom. Fe fi fo fum. The hollow sound made Addy want to cover her ears and scream in mindless terror. It vibrated against her skin and rattled her bones, dark music from the bowels of hell. This was demon magic, she realized dimly, through her fright. It stripped the mind of reason and replaced it with stark, primitive fear, fear of the boogie man and the thing under the bed and the horror of the unknown.

  Boom, boom, boom. She whirled around. Two more convicts entered the park from the south. Each held a severed human head. Three prison guards had been killed in the breakout, the sheriff said. And a store owner and two customers at Jordan’s Crossing. Boom and boom again. The last two escaped prisoners came, one from the east and one from the west, ghoulish plunder in hand. Addy counted. Six heads, six victims. Boom, boom, boom. The convicts thumped the heads with their fists, sounding their dreadful song. The ground boiled, and a cloud of insects rose in the air, bringing with them the smell of wet earth and moldering leaves, rotting bugs, and worms and other small creatures. The damp, musty stench penetrated the shield, filling Addy’s nostrils and mouth with the smell and taste of detritus and decay.

  She coughed and spit to get the taste of death out of her mouth. “Brand’s spell might work on demons, but it sure doesn’t work on stink.”

  Evie was red faced from holding her breath.

  Addy pounded her on the back. “Breathe, Eves. Spit it out before you choke on it.”

  Evie sucked in a lung full of air and coughed. “La . . . dies don’t spit,” she said with a gasp. “Bitsy says.”

  “They do if they got bug funk in their throats.”

  The black column of insects swirled in a dizzying pattern over the convicts’ heads and settled back down, covering everything in a blanket of tiny, moving bodies. Evie screamed as the shield was enveloped by thousands of roaches, stinkbugs, beetles, and other winged insects.

  “Bugs.” Evie did a shivery little dance. “Oh, my God, we’re buried alive in bugs! I hate bugs, especially roaches. And stinkbugs. They crackle when they walk. Yuck!”

  Crackle when they walk? No time to think about that one. Addy was too worried about Brand.

  She rushed to the edge of the shield, frantic to see what was happening. “I can’t see. I can’t see Brand.”

  Frustrated, she smacked her hand against the shield, her fear and anger fueling the blow. She felt a pulling sensation. Her palm burned. The shield crackled and flared, bright blue and then white. The curtain of bugs slid to the ground in a smoking heap. The once green park was covered in a thick carpet of dead bugs.

  “You got ’em, Addy.” Evie jumped up and down with excitement. “You got ’em!”

  Addy barely heard her. Her attention was focused on the two warriors. They stood back to back. The inmates surrounded them in a loose circle. Grinning, three of the men dropped the heads they carried. Bones cracked and skin and clothing split as the demons inside them took full control. A convict’s head and jaw elongated grotesquely. His enormous, gaping mouth bristled with a double row of sharp teeth. Flesh tore with a wet, meaty sound as a row of steely red spikes sprang from the man’s hunched back. His arms and legs grew into long, leathery limbs that ended in cruel claws. A second man took the form of a gigantic wolf with six legs and three heads with vice-like, slavering jaws. The third man stretched and grew into a ten-foot ogre with one eye in the middle of his bulging forehead, and a wide, drooling mouth. A naked ten-foot ogre with skin like tanned hide and feet like concrete blocks. And a gi-normous ogre-size hairy arse. Eww.

  With a guttural roar, the ogre pulled up a flowering pear tree by the roots and swung it at Brand and Ansgar. They ducked, avoiding the blow with ease.

  Brand straightened. “Hear me, djegrali.”

  His deep voice rang around the square. He sounded calm and unafraid, like a man who had things under control.

  As if.

  Not if Cerberus the three-headed wolf or Mr. Hairy Butt Cheeks or the guy that looked like somebody had mated the monster from Aliens with a horny toad had anything to say about it.

  “Return with me and my brother peaceably,” he said, “and you will be banished to the Pit. Fight and we will destroy you.”

  He held out his left hand, palm side up. A small, curved bottle with a stoppered top appeared in his hand.

  Was he serious? He was threatening a Cyclops with a perfume bottle? The three convicts still in human form jeered and beat on their drums.

  Brand shrugged and closed his hand. The bottle disappeared.

  The ogre opened his slack, lipless mouth and bellowed. The sound was deafening, a hundred rampaging elephants trumpeting their rage at once. He lurched forward, swinging his makeshift club like an enormous mace. One blow from that club and Brand and Ansgar would be smashed to bits.

  “Mine,” Ansgar said as cool as you please.

  Stepping forward, he fitted an arrow into his bow and fired in one smooth motion. The arrow whistled through the air and skewered the ogre in his one eye. The ogre bawled like an injured calf and crashed to the ground. The mountainous, fleshy body trembled in gelatinous waves, and the ogre disappeared. In the monster’s place a dead convict lay on the ground, a shining silver arrow between his eyes. Something dark oozed out of the corpse and pooled on the ground. A despairing wail rose from the puddle. The hair on Addy’s arms and neck stood on end at the eerie sound. The liquid patch of darkness solidified and cracked, then shattered into dust that was caught and blown asunder by a sudden rush of wind.

  After that, things seemed to happen at once. Howling with rage, the gigantic wolf and the lizard monster attacked. Addy saw Brand’s sword flash in a flaming arc and heard the sharp twang of arrows as Ansgar fired his bow. A wolfen head hit the ground, jaws snapping. Arrows bounced off the lizard monster’s leathery skin.

  “Aim for the throat, Ansgar,” Brand shouted, stabbing one of two remaining wolf heads in the neck. The huge animal shuddered and snarled, snapping at Brand as the wounded head sagged. Brand dove under the wolf, stabbing it deep in the belly. It gave a gurgling cry and collapsed. Brand rolled free and sprang to his feet, chopping off the third and last head with a swinging blow. The wolf vanished, leaving in its place a dead convict with a severed head and a deep slash across his abdomen.

  Ansgar smiled as he battled his monster. And he was singing. He danced between the monster’s clawed limbs on nimble feet, a strapping, flaxen-haired, six-and-a-half-foot Viking god, Fred Astaire doing the quick step with a nightmarish Ginger Rogers. He sang as he dodged the thing’s biting jaws, belting out a song in a language Addy did not recognize. Evie giggled. Oh, boy. Ansgar’s singing made girlfriend giddy even at a distance. On the bright side, his yodeling seemed to annoy the monster, even cause it pain. The creature opened its toothy maw with a roar of protest. Ansgar stopped singing and fired a swift volley of arrows down the monster’s throat. The thing stiffened and crashed to the ground. A moment later it disappeared. A man lay on the ground, half a dozen arrows sticking out of his neck.

  Dark sludge leaked out of the dead men’s bodies and stained the ground, hardened and cracked. The wraiths shrieked, turned to dust, and blew away.

  “Look, Addy.” Evie pointed to the three corpses on the ground. She sounded a little woozy from the aftereffects of Ansgar’s singing, but otherwise okay.

  The bodies of the men collapsed and folded in on themselves, like deflated balloons, leaving a big clump of loose skin on the ground. The skin dissolved and melted away.

  “Gross,” Addy said. “What happened?”

  Evie came over to take a closer look. “I don’t know. It’s like the demons used them all up.”

  “Maybe so. Something sure happened to them.”

  The three demons still in human form shouted something in a foul, guttural language.

  Evie clutched Addy’s arm. “What are they saying?”

  “I don’t know, but I got a feeling it’s not good.”
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br />   The earth shook in response to the demons’ call and vomited out a horde of mud critters. Roughly the size of a hub cap and clam shaped, the demons’ soldiers were all mouth, with row upon row of serrated teeth. They clattered across the park on slender, birdlike legs, consuming all within their path like an army of hungry Pac-Men gobbling up pac-dots.

  The gobblers swarmed over Brand and Ansgar, and the warriors disappeared.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Brand and Ansgar shook off the nasty little gobblers like a couple of big dogs shaking water from their fur. Their clothes were in shreds, and dozens of vicious bite marks marred their powerful bodies. Brand held out his hand, and there was a blinding flash of light. When Addy’s vision cleared, she saw the warriors standing on top of a big mound of dead gobblers. Their wounds had healed—score another one for the miraculous Dalvahni constitution. Their tattered jeans and shirts were gone and they were once more clad in their leather clothing. What, did they have a secret cosmic Rubbermaid compartment where they kept their warrior duds?

  To her relief, they seemed to be holding their own in the fight. Brand swept his sword back and forth, cleaving mud critters left and right. Ansgar fired his arrows with the rapidity of a well-oiled machine gun, his movements a blur. Addy felt a glimmer of hope. Maybe things were going to be okay. Brand and Ansgar were professionals. She was worried for nothing. Fighting demons and creatures of darkness was their job, something they were created to do. They had to be good at it to have survived this long, right?

  Her relief was short-lived. The demon-men shouted something harsh, and the earth belched out a second wave of gobblers. The insatiable creatures darted toward Brand and Ansgar like a crazed army of sandpipers wearing clamshell hats with teeth.

  “There are too many of them,” Addy cried. “They can’t stop them all. Oh, my God, they’re going to be eaten alive.” She flung her body against the shield, pounding it with her fists. “Brand. Brand.”

  Terror streaked through her, and a surge of energy that started at the soles of her feet, moved up her legs and torso, and burst from her fingertips in a brilliant flash of light. The shield exploded in a shower of sparks, and she pitched forward onto her knees. Shaken, she scrambled to her feet. Crap, she’d broken the shield. How the heck did she do that? Brand was not going to be a happy camper.