by Sara Snow
“Get the fuck off me!” The demon tried to turn under my weight, but his movements were slow and cumbersome. I took hold of his horns and began to twist his head back and forth, hoping to snap his neck. But his throat was as thick as a bull’s, too strong for me to snap.
I pulled the stake out of my back pocket, held it high, and drove the sharp tip into the hollow at the base of the demon’s throat. He froze for a moment as the breath left his body. Blood burbled from the hole I made when I yanked the stake out.
“Damn you, cambion! Damn you to Hell!”
He clutched at his throat, staggering in circles. Somehow, I knew that being damned by a demon was no figure of speech. He had literally cursed me to eternal damnation. Did that mean I had no hope of ever being good? Had he called on the devil and his minions to come and claim me?
I gripped his sides with my legs, clinging to one horn with my left hand, and hung on. My thighs ached from the effort of maintaining that hold on him, but I needed the advantage of that position.
I rode him while he spun in slow, reckless circles. As he bellowed curses at me, I stabbed at him with the iron stake, gouging his shoulders and the back of his neck. The hole in his throat had stunned him, but it hadn’t disabled him.
In horror, I watched as the gashes I made in his neck began to seal themselves up. This monster shared my power of rapid healing. What if that proved he was right about who I was? What if, at the core of my being, I was a sister to him and his evil minions?
The thought that he might be right about me only enraged me more. I stabbed at his head, driving the stake into his temple. I jabbed at his eyes. But I knew it didn’t matter where I wounded him; his body would keep repairing itself unless I stabbed him through the heart.
Grunting and gasping, the demon reached under his chin and hooked his own flesh with one of his talons. The fingernail caught a flap of skin, which he pulled over his face like a rubber Halloween mask. Under those grotesque, waxen features was the diabolical face of a beast. Its skin was burnished red, bubbling with vesicles that seeped vile-smelling fluid.
If a human female had merged with a male goat and their offspring had been plunged into a vat of boiling oil, this freak would be the product.
Blinded by the blood gushing from his wounds, the demon fell to his knees. I fell on top of him. The holes in his skull were closing quickly, but not fast enough. The blood loss had weakened him, and his flesh couldn’t regenerate itself rapidly enough to continue fighting with me. He would have to drag himself off to his lair and spend time recovering before he could kill again.
With the demon collapsed on the ground, I had full advantage over him. I sat on top of his chest, stabbing in the direction of his heart. He held up his wide, taloned hands in self-defense, but he was no match for my rage.
I struck again and again at his heart, but my iron stake wouldn’t pierce his flesh. His chest felt as hard as a metal breastplate. I was causing him pain, but I wasn’t close to penetrating his heart.
My useless efforts at stabbing the demon brought back the memory of training with Carter at the warehouse. He had dragged out that ridiculous burlap dummy and told me to practice stabbing the red X in the center of its chest. I remembered stabbing the dummy repeatedly until bits of straw flew out of the ragged hole.
Maybe that was my problem—I wasn’t striking the demon in the right spot.
I rammed the stake into the place where the X had been marked on the straw man. The stake didn’t pierce his chest wall, but the area felt softer, more yielding. I was getting closer to my target. One more mighty heave, and this foul being would vanish from the earth forever.
The demon caught me in his sights and glared at me. His red eyes glowed like infernal coals. He had healed enough to regain some of his energy, and now he had me in full view. He reached up and clutched my throat, his broad thumbs flattening my windpipe so that I couldn’t breathe.
The world around me started to go gray and fuzzy. The demon had his weak points, but Carter was right—he was much stronger than I was. I could only outsmart him for so long before his brute force overcame me.
My body went limp. The demon shoved me off of his chest, flipped me onto my back, and held me down on the ground. I knew that I was lying next to the blonde girl; soon, I would be her sister in death, the next corpse in his collection.
Though my eyes were still fogged, I could see the demon reach for something at the edge of my vision. He raised his arm. I caught the flash of a knife blade. He lifted the blade high—
For a split second, I wondered if being half demon made me immortal.
“Georgia! Roll now!”
The demon turned his heavy body at the sound of Carter’s shout. Still pinned by his weight, I couldn’t free myself completely. But I managed to slide far enough out of the way that the stream of fire from the flamethrower could engulf his body.
He screamed, arms flailing as the fire scorched his flesh. An acrid smell, like burning rubber, filled the air. Smoke billowed from the holes I had left in his chest.
“Keep rolling, Georgia! You’re on fire!” Carter shouted.
With all the strength I had left, I dragged my body out from under the demon and rolled back and forth in the dirt. Adrenaline, mixed with sheer terror, numbed the pain of the flames that licked my arms and chest. Carter caught me, tore off my smoldering shirt, and threw it in the lake.
I hugged my bare arms. The blistered skin was already repairing itself, but it still hurt like hell. The demon’s charred body continued to buck and thrash on the ground. Smoke rose from the blackened remains of his flesh.
Carter grabbed the iron stake off the ground where I had dropped it when the demon began to choke me. He lifted the stake and plunged it through the demon’s heart. The demon’s body seized. Then, he exploded in a cloud of mist.
I lay on the ground, panting. My seared lungs weren’t healing as fast as my skin, and every breath was agony.
Carter stared down at me. A lock of dark hair fell across his eyes. His face was ruddy from the heat, and his breathing was as ragged as mine.
“I didn’t think I’d make it,” I gasped.
“I never had a doubt,” Carter replied. He sank down to his knees and tried to take me into his arms, but I stiffened. I hadn’t forgotten what he and the rest of the Venandi had done. He had saved my ass today, but he had destroyed my trust.
I knew which one I would have rather lost.
27
Georgia
There was nothing left of the demon but a heap of ash on the ground and a nauseating odor in the air. The dead girl’s balloon had finally begun to lose its helium, and the yellow orb floated in mid-air over the kill site. Carter helped me to my feet, slipped his jacket over my bare torso, and held me upright while we walked slowly back to the stairs. Carter said that when we got back to the car, he would call the police and anonymously report the location of the blonde girl’s body.
“That way she can find some rest,” he said. “She can have closure, and so can her family.”
I wished it was that easy for me to get closure. I would have to live the rest of my life with the knowledge that I was half-demon, capable of unspeakable acts of evil like the ones I had witnessed today. No matter how hard I tried to prove that I was good, I would never be able to forget that I had the potential for terrible destruction.
“I think we need to celebrate,” Carter said, taking my hand when we got in the car. “You were magnificent back there. I’ve never seen a human fight a demon with so much strength or courage.”
I pulled my hand away. “Who said I was human?” I asked.
“Who said you weren’t?”
“Well, you would know better than me, Carter.” My sarcasm was so acidic that it burned my own tongue.
I turned to face the window and watched the sights of the carnival go by. Everything had been so different when we arrived today. The world had been dangerous, but those dangers were all on the outside, in the realm
of demons. Now, I had to be afraid of getting hurt by the people I had trusted with my whole heart.
“Georgia, is this about what the demon said to you?”
Carter rested his right hand on my thigh as he steered the car with his left. I stared down at his hand as if it were some strange, severed appendage that had landed in my lap.
Why was he bothering to try and get close to me when he knew how hurt I was? I felt about a hundred years older than the girl who had sat beside him this morning, sneaking glimpses of his cleanly-etched profile as he drove. That girl had been nursing a serious crush on this half-vampire. Whatever or whoever I was now could barely stand to sit beside him.
“I don’t want to talk about it now,” I said flatly.
I was still numb from the events of the past twenty-four hours. I was having trouble processing everything that had happened, from Jose’s oracular dream about the yellow balloon to the discovery of the blonde girl’s corpse under the pier and my encounter with the demon.
The demon’s breath had been hot on my cheek when he’d leaned in and told me that I was half-evil. That my mother had donated a human egg while a powerful demon had provided the diabolical seed. He had said that I must join the army of demons or risk a terrible death. The Venandi were weak. I, on the other hand, had the potential to be incredibly strong, like my demon father.
I hadn’t seen my mother since I was eight years old, when I was taken from the apartment that we shared for the last time. I knew that we were going to be evicted after her most recent boyfriend-slash-dealer had left her for another woman and stopped helping with the rent. When the lady from Child Protective Services came to take me away, I was almost relieved. My mother didn’t even notice as I walked out the door, hand-in-hand with the friendly, gray-haired social worker. She had nodded off on the couch that morning and hadn’t moved anything but her eyelids when the door closed shut.
Was my mom still alive? If she had kept shooting heroin at the rate she was going, she had probably been dead for years. Maybe after I left, she had cleaned up her act and vowed that she would get me back some day.
Yeah, right. Somehow, I doubted that. The only signs that I had left would have been the growing piles of laundry and dirty dishes around the apartment. My mother never cleaned or washed clothes. She was Sleeping Beauty, dozing her days away on the couch while I cooked and cleaned for the both of us.
I should really look her up someday.
My mother, if she had any brain cells left, would have the answers to a lot of my questions.
“I have a question for you,” I said to Carter. “What made you decide to look for your human father all those years ago?”
We had stopped at a traffic light. Carter let the car idle while he reacted to my question. Cars behind us started to honk, but he sat there, pondering, even after the light turned green.
“I wanted to find the side of my family that had given me my conscience,” he said. “As a vampire, I had no sense of right or wrong. The moral world was a single color: red. I needed blood to survive, and I didn’t care who had to suffer to feed my hunger. But there was something inside that nagged at me, that haunted me after I fed. When I realized that I actually had a conscience hidden in there, I knew I had to find the source of it.”
“What if you had been raised by your father? Do you think you would have grown up to be good? Would you have cared about finding your vampire side?”
Carter finally responded to the enraged drivers behind us and pulled the car forward through the intersection.
“I think I probably would have,” he said. “Don’t we all want to discover the hidden parts of our nature?”
“Not necessarily. Sometimes, it’s easier not to know where you came from. Sometimes, it’s harder to take the truth about yourself.”
He thought about this for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “I know what you mean.”
Carter didn’t bother to ask me if I wanted to return to my own apartment. He just drove me to the warehouse, as if that were my home now. Though I didn’t want to go back to the apartment—I had no way to pay my rent now that I had walked out on my job—I really didn’t want to go to the warehouse either. I suddenly found myself in a no-man’s land, stuck between two lives.
I offered to clean our weapons and put them back in their place in the training center. Cleaning things always helped me feel more focused, and I needed to focus now. I had to figure out what my next step would be, and how I would live with myself as a cambion.
Cambion.
I weighed the word in my mind. That was my true identity. It might explain why I had never fit in anywhere or felt at home with other human beings.
In the training room, I ran into Eli, who had just finished working out with one of the punching bags. Sweat gleamed on his fit, muscular body. His face radiated a sense of peace and calm, the kind of feeling that only comes from kicking and punching the hell out of something.
“Hey, Georgia,” he greeted me. “How was the morning?”
Eli looked so healthy and serene as he casually toweled off that I wanted to punch him myself.
“I thought you and Kingston were going to join us,” I said. My voice sounded cold. “Carter and I killed the demon who was murdering girls at the carnival, but I just about got my ass burned off in the process.”
“Carter told us to stand by and act as backup. He said the two of you could handle it.” Eli looked confused. “He made it sound like an easy kill.”
“Well, it wasn’t. Not from my perspective, anyway. Of course, I’m not immortal like Carter.”
“But you had the flamethrower, right? It’s hard to go wrong with one of those.”
“I used the stake. Carter used the flamethrower. We got the job done. Now I need to clean the weapons and put them away.”
I brushed past Eli, leaving him to stare after me in bewilderment. He was probably wondering what had happened to turn me into such a raging bitch all of a sudden.
I almost asked Eli if he knew I was a cambion. But I didn’t have to ask—I was one hundred-percent sure that everyone in the Venandi knew about me. I just wasn’t sure if they had ever planned to tell me, or if they’d wanted to keep using me for my powers as long as they could.
After Eli left the training room, I heard him in the hallway, laughing with Olympia. Olympia must have known, too. Out of all of them, she should have been the one to stand up for me, to force the others to tell me the truth. Then, there was Kingston—gentle, kind, and good. Had he known about my half-evil nature, too?
I used soft cloths to carefully clean the iron stakes. I took time scrubbing away the remains of the demon’s blood. I remembered how quickly those holes in his flesh and skull had sealed themselves. If we had that one gift in common, there must be other traits we shared, too.
I knew that I could be stubborn, mouthy, and sarcastic. But those traits didn’t make me evil. In fact, some people liked those qualities, including Carter. That’s why I had thought we might have a future together—he had liked me in spite of, or because of, the worst aspects of myself.
Evil beings took advantage of vulnerable people, like the children in those cages or the girl with the yellow balloon. They committed cruel acts with no remorse or regret. They roamed the streets looking for humans to treat as slaves or as fodder for other supernatural beings.
I wasn’t like that at all. I protected weak, defenseless creatures—I had never consciously harmed anyone who wasn’t threatening me. And if I did hurt someone unintentionally, I always felt remorseful afterward.
Most of all, I was honest. I didn’t lie to my friends and I tried not to lie to myself. I could be counted on to keep other people’s secrets. And if I had known something about a friend that threatened their life or their sense of self, I would have told them—immediately.
I placed the weapons on the wall and stood back to check my work. I wished I could carve a notch in the stake I had used to stab the demon. The charge I’d felt when I slammed
that stake into his chest could have powered the whole city of Chicago.
If I was half-demon, why did I feel so triumphant about slaughtering one of my own? I had so many questions, but no one I trusted enough to ask.
“You really were amazing today.” Carter had entered the training room and was standing right behind me. “That stake and I were lucky to have been a part of it.”
“Oh, cut the crap.” I spun around to face Carter. He looked stunned. “It’s time to talk.”
“Alright. Let’s do that. Want to go somewhere more comfortable?”
“Like your bedroom, maybe? So you can feel up my human side and then laugh about my demon side behind my back with your friends? Or are you looking for some kinky half-demon sex? A cambion fetish, perhaps?”
“Georgia, I have never laughed at you. And I would never use you for sex.”
“But you knew I was a cambion. You knew it from the first night I met you. Am I correct?”
“Yes, I knew.” He sighed. “I knew that you were a cambion because you were surrounded by demons who were attracted to your power. A cambion who has just entered adulthood is especially powerful, and that’s the perfect time for them to lure you over to their side.”
“Why do I have to join one side or the other? Why can’t I just be myself?”
“You know why, Georgia. It’s not safe for you to be out on your own. You need the protection of beings who’ve chosen the side of good. You need a team like the Venandi behind you to help you slay these demons.”
I planted my hands on my hips. “If you’re all so damn good, then why didn’t any of you tell me? You all knew I was a cambion, didn’t you?”